Jonathan Haidt Quotes



Best 28 Quotes by Jonathan Haidt

“Awe is the emotion of self-transcendence.”

“Dividing into teams doesn't necessarily mean denigrating others. Studies of groupishness have generally found that groups increase in-group love far more than they increase out-group hostility.”

“Economic issues are just as much moral issues as social issues.”

“If you have high IQ, you're really good at finding post-hoc arguments to support your feelings of truthiness.”

“Reciprocity is a deep instinct; it is the basic currency of social life.”

“Sports is to war as p*rnography is to sex.”

“The initial organization of the brain does not depend that much on experience. Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises.”

“The most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation — a force for construction and destruction.”

“The rider evolved to serve to the elephant.”

“You can't make a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail. And you can't change people's minds by utterly refuting their arguments.”

The Happiness Hypothesis Quotes

“Happiness is not something that you can find, acquire, or achieve directly. You have to get the conditions right and then wait. Some of those conditions are within you, such as coherence among the parts and levels of your personality. Other conditions require relationships to things beyond you: Just as plants need sun, water, and good soil to thrive, people need love, work, and a connection to something larger. It is worth striving to get the right relationships between yourself and others, between yourself and your work, and between yourself and something larger than yourself. If you get these relationships right, a sense of purpose and meaning will emerge.”

The Happiness Hypothesis

“If you are in passionate love and want to celebrate your passion, read poetry. If your ardor has calmed and you want to understand your evolving relationship, read psychology. But if you have just ended a relationship and would like to believe you are better off without love, read philosophy.”

The Happiness Hypothesis

“Love and work are to people what water and sunshine are to plants.”

The Happiness Hypothesis

“Suppose you read about a pill that you could take once a day to reduce anxiety and increase your contentment. Would you take it? Suppose further that the pill has a great variety of side effects, all of them good: increased self-esteem, empathy, and trust; it even improves memory. Suppose, finally, that the pill is all natural and costs nothing. Now would you take it? The pill exists. It is meditation.”

The Happiness Hypothesis

The Righteous Mind Quotes

“Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason.”

The Righteous Mind

“Groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies.”

The Righteous Mind

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“When we believe ourselves in possession of the only truth, we are likely to be indifferent to common everyday truths.”


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“If you grow up in a weird society, you become so well educated in the ethic of autonomy that you can detect oppression and inequality even where the apparent victims see nothing wrong.”

The Righteous Mind

“If you really want to change someone’s mind on a moral or political matter, you’ll need to see things from that person’s angle as well as your own. And if you do truly see it the other person’s way—deeply and intuitively—you might even find your own mind opening in response. Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it’s very difficult to empathize across a moral divide.”

The Righteous Mind

“If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you’ll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you.”

The Righteous Mind

“Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.”

The Righteous Mind

“Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.”

The Righteous Mind

“Our moral thinking is much more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for truth.”

The Righteous Mind

“People who devote their lives to studying something often come to believe that the object of their fascination is the key to understanding everything.”

The Righteous Mind

“Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice.”

The Righteous Mind

“Science is a smorgasbord, and Google will guide you to the study that's right for you.”

The Righteous Mind

“The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.”

The Righteous Mind

“Understanding the simple fact that morality differs around the world, and even within societies, is the first step toward understanding your righteous mind.”

The Righteous Mind

“When a group of people make something sacred, the members of the cult lose the ability to think clearly about it. Morality binds and blinds.”

The Righteous Mind

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“It takes surprisingly little in terms of uncontrollable unpleasantness to make humans give up and become helpless in a generalized way.”


More quotes by Robert Sapolsky