Jordan Peterson

Part of the reason there's an injunction to the truth, for example, is that if you're in a circumstance of extreme uncertainty, your best weapon, let's say, or your best tool or your best defense is the truth, because it keeps things simpler.

I don't tell people, 'You're okay the way that you are.' That's not the right story. The right story is, 'You're way less than you could be.'

Once someone has spent enough time cultivating bad habits and biding their time, they are much diminished. Much of what they could have been has dissipated.

If you learn a martial art, you learn to be dangerous, but simultaneously, you learn to control it.

Life is tragic. You are tiny and flawed and ignorant and weak, and everything else is huge, complex, and overwhelming.

Music has an intrinsic meaning, which has always been mysterious to me.

I'm interested in what motivates individuals to participate in atrocious acts to support their ideological identification.

It's not proper for the government to intrude too thoroughly into the domain of the family. It's inappropriate.

If you don't stand your ground, then all that happens is people push you backwards.

It's in responsibility that most people find the meaning that sustains them through life. It's not in happiness. It's not in impulsive pleasure.

In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion-, and even nation-centred cultures.

The answer to the problem of inequality is for the people who are fortunate enough to either have been gifted or deserved more to do everything they can to make the communities around them as strong as they possibly can.

I have a hard time figuring out what kind of box to put me in, too, because I don't know exactly what's going on around me or why. But I need to stay outside of boxes because then I can look at what's inside of them without being part of them.

I've studied authoritarianism for a very long time - for 40 years - and they're started by people's attempts to control the ideological and linguistic territory.

If you're not going to be rewarded for your virtues, and instead you're going to be punished for them, then what's your motivation to continue?

If you want to occupy the C-suite or the top one-tenth of 1% in any organization, you have to be obsessively devoted to your career at the expense of everything else. And women look at that, and they think, 'No.'

I like to recede away from classifications. You might say that indicates a fundamental lack of commitment. I suppose that's true to some degree.

Accept the terrible responsibility of life with eyes wide open.

To me, ideology is corrupt; it's a parasite on religious structures. To be an ideologue is to have all of the terrible things that are associated with religious certainty and none of the utility. If you're an ideologue, you believe everything that you think. If you're religious, there's a mystery left there.

I could hardly sit through 'Frozen.' There was an attempt to craft a moral message and to build the story around that, instead of building the story and letting the moral message emerge. It was the subjugation of art to propaganda, in my estimation.

Assuming if there's such a thing as reality, if you have a false relationship with it, how can you do anything but fail?