Free speech is not just another value. It’s the foundation of Western civilization.
Jordan Peterson Quotes on Relationships
We’re so immaturely cynical as a culture. We’re not wise enough to look at an institution like marriage and to really things about what it means and what it signifies. It signifies a place where people can tie the ropes of their lives together so that they’re stronger. It signifies a place where people can tell the truth to one another.
You can’t have a value structure without a hierarchy. They’re the same thing because a value structure means one thing takes precedence over another.
The masculine spirit is under assault. It’s obvious.
The connection between psychology, mythology, and literature is as important as the connection between psychology and biology and the hard sciences.
Assuming if there’s such a thing as reality, if you have a false relationship with it, how can you do anything but fail?
It makes sense that a witch lives in a swamp.
‘Happiness’ is a pointless goal.
The idea that women were oppressed throughout history is an appalling theory.
It’s not proper for the government to intrude too thoroughly into the domain of the family. It’s inappropriate.
All things considered, there’s nobody better for children than parents.
Jordan Peterson Quotes on Life
Life is tragic. You are tiny and flawed and ignorant and weak, and everything else is huge, complex, and overwhelming.
Life is very difficult. One of the most ancient of religious ideas that emerges everywhere, I would say, is that life is essentially suffering.
No one gets away with anything, ever, so take responsibility for your own life.
You can say, ‘Well, isn’t it unfortunate that chaos is represented by the feminine’ – well, it might be unfortunate, but it doesn’t matter, because that is how it’s represented. It’s been represented like that forever. And there are reasons for it. You can’t change it. It’s not possible. This is underneath everything.
It’s not just human nature to associate in tribes. It’s deeper than that.
The highly functional infrastructure that surrounds us, particularly in the West, is a gift from our ancestors: the comparatively uncorrupt political and economic systems, the technology, the wealth, the lifespan, the freedom, the luxury, and the opportunity.
As pessimistic as I am about the nature of human beings and our capacity for atrocity and malevolence and betrayal and laziness and inertia, and all those things, I think we can transcend all that and set things straight.
You can’t go backward in life.
It’s a small percentage of people who do the 80-hour-a-week high-powered career thing, and they’re almost all men. Why? Well, men are driven by socio-economic status more than women.
Music has an intrinsic meaning, which has always been mysterious to me.
We have to rediscover the eternal values and then live them out.
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.
Some of these Ivy League kids want to have it both ways. They want to be baby members of the 1 percent, which they most certainly are, and yet still portray themselves as the oppressed.
In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion-, and even nation-centred cultures.
The narrow bandwidth of TV has made us think that we are stupider than we are.
The literature associating inequality with social instability and poor health outcomes is pretty convincing.
Jordan Peterson Quotes on Success
If you learn a martial art, you learn to be dangerous, but simultaneously, you learn to control it.
The multiplication force of technology on cognitive differences is massive.
If you’re a social scientist worth your salt, you never do a univariate analysis.
To master a new technology, you have to play with it.
Power is competence.
It’s very difficult to regulate yourself, and if you learn to do that, well, it starts to spill over.
There were some great clinicians in the 20th century – great men. Freud was a genius; Jung was a genius; Carl Rogers was a genius – there’s a half-dozen psychologists of the 1950s and humanists of the 1960s.
There’s a personality trait known as agreeableness. Agreeable people are compassionate and polite. And agreeable people get paid less than disagreeable people for the same job. Women are more agreeable than men.
People have this capacity within them to set the world straight.
If you fulfill your obligations every day you don’t need to worry about the future.
Jordan Peterson Quotes on Truth
I like working-class people, generally speaking.
The truth is something that burns. It burns off dead wood. And people don’t like having the dead wood burnt off, often because they’re 95 percent dead wood.
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.
When you start to realise how much of what you’ve constructed of yourself is based on deception and lies, that is a horrifying realisation.
I have something in common with Nazis in that I am opposed to the radical Left. And when you oppose the radical Left, you end up being a part of a much larger group that includes Nazis in it.
The people who hold that our culture is an oppressive patriarchy, they don’t want to admit that the current hierarchy might be predicated on competence.
You may say, ‘Well, dragons don’t exist.’ It’s, like, yes they do – the category ‘predator’ and the category ‘dragon’ are the same category. It absolutely exists. It’s a superordinate category. It exists absolutely more than anything else. In fact, it really exists.
Part of the core information that I’ve been purveying is that identity politics is a sick game. You don’t play racial, ethnic, and gender identity games. The Left plays them on behalf of the oppressed, let’s say, and the Right tends to play them on behalf of nationalism and ethnic pride. I think they’re equally dangerous.
Whether or not I like a piece of data has very little bearing on whether or not I am likely to accept it.
Obviously, I’m no fan of the radical left.
Jordan Peterson Quotes on Responsibility
Don’t compare yourself with other people; compare yourself with who you were yesterday.
I happen to be a big fan of Western civilization; I think it beats the hell out of tyranny and starvation.
Men and women aren’t the same. And they won’t be the same. That doesn’t mean that they can’t be treated fairly.
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.
Accept the terrible responsibility of life with eyes wide open.
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.
Become aware of your own insufficiency.
Abortion is clearly wrong.
I am not going to be a mouthpiece for language that I detest.
People have been fed this diet of pabulum, rights, and impulsive freedom. There’s just an absolute starvation for the other side of the story.
One of the things I’ve told men over and over and over and over is if you’re being rejected by all the women that you approach, it’s not the women!
It is more difficult to rule yourself than to rule a city.
Adopt responsibility for your own well-being, try to put your family together, try to serve your community, try to seek for eternal truth… That’s the sort of thing that can ground you in your life, enough so that you can withstand the difficulty of life.
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.
There’s no doubt that inequality destabilizes societies. I think the social science evidence on that front is crystal clear.
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.
It isn’t generally the case that liberals dominate entire hierarchies. That isn’t generally how it works, because the hierarchies are usually set up so that conservatives fill up the hierarchies; it’s in the nature of hierarchy.
You can’t just slander someone, defame them, lie about them. You can’t incite people to crime. There’re all sorts of reasonable restrictions on free speech that are already codified in the British common-law system.
It took untold generations to get you where you are. A little gratitude might be in order. If you’re going to insist on bending the world to your way, you better have your reasons.
To suffer terribly and to know yourself as the cause: that is Hell.
Jordan Peterson Quotes on Courage
Don’t lie about anything, ever. Lying leads to Hell.
Don’t be dependent. At all. Ever. Period.
If you don’t stand your ground, then all that happens is people push you backwards.
If you’re talking to a man who wouldn’t fight with you under any circumstances whatsoever, then you’re talking to someone for whom you have absolutely no respect.
Women deeply want men who are competent and powerful. And I don’t mean power in that they can exert tyrannical control over others. That’s not power. That’s just corruption.
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.’
You should do what other people do, unless you have a very good reason not to.
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?
It’s very hard to find your own words – and you don’t actually exist until you have your own words.
I’m interested in what motivates individuals to participate in atrocious acts to support their ideological identification.
And if you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of.
I don’t think that you have any insight whatsoever into your capacity for good until you have some well-developed insight into your capacity for evil.
About Jordan Peterson
Jordan Bernt Peterson is a clinical psychologist, YouTube personality, and author from Canada. Peterson was born on June 12, 1962, and then raised in Alberta. He has bachelor’s degrees in political science and psychology from the University of Alberta and a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from McGill University.
After teaching and doing research at Harvard University, he moved to Canada in 1998 to join the psychology department at the University of Toronto. Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, his first book, was released in 1999 and served as the foundation for many of his following lectures. The book integrated knowledge from psychology, mythology, religion, literature, philosophy, and neuroscience to investigate belief and meaning systems.
Peterson made a series of YouTube videos in 2016 denouncing the Act to Amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code (Bill C-16), which the Parliament of Canada enacted to include “gender identity and expression” as a forbidden basis of discrimination.
After that, Peterson’s lectures and dialogues, widely disseminated via podcasts and YouTube, garnered millions of viewers. By 2018, when he released his second book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, he had parked his clinical practice and teaching obligations on hold. After being promoted with a globe tour, it became a best-seller in various countries.
Peterson’s work was hindered in 2019 and 2020 by health issues related to a severe benzodiazepine withdrawal syndrome. Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, his third book, was released in 2021, and he resumed active podcasting.
FAQs
What are the 12 rules of life according to Jordan Peterson?
The 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan B Peterson reads:
- Stand up straight with your shoulders straight
- Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping
- Befriend people who want the best for you
- Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not the useless person you are today
- Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them
- Set your house in order before you criticize the world
- Pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient
- Tell the truth. Or at least don’t lie
- Assume the person you are listening to knows something you don’t
- Be precise in your speech
- Do not bother children while they are skateboarding
- Pet a cat when you encounter one in the street
What classes does Jordan Peterson teach?
Dr. Jordan B. Peterson is a professor of psychology and the author of the multi-million copy bestseller 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, which was number one in nonfiction in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, the Netherlands, Brazil, and Norway in 2018 and is now being translated into 50 languages.
