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Jordan Peterson Quotes
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Jordan Bernt Peterson is a Canadian clinical psychologist and a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. His main areas of study are in abnormal, social, and personality psychology, with a particular interest in the psychology of religious and ideological belief, and the assessment and improvement of personality and performance.Peterson studied at the University of Alberta and McGill University. He remained at McGill as a post-doctoral fellow from 1991 to 1993 before moving to Harvard University, where he was an assistant and then associate professor in the psychology department. In 1998, he moved back to Canada, as a faculty member in the psychology department at the University of Toronto, where he is currently a full professor.

Peterson's first book, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, published in 1999, examined several academic fields to describe the structure of systems of beliefs and myths, their role in the regulation of emotion, creation of meaning, and several other topics such as motivation for genocide. His second book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, was released in January 2018.In 2016, Peterson released a series of YouTube videos criticizing political correctness and the Canadian government's Bill C-16. The act added gender identity as a prohibited ground of discrimination, which Peterson characterised as an introduction of compelled speech into law. He subsequently received significant media coverage, attracting both support and criticism.



✵ 12. June 1962
Jordan Peterson photo
Jordan Peterson: 202   quotes 227   likes

Jordan Peterson Quotes

“The bible is a collective attempt by humanity to solve the deepest problems that we have. The deepest of all problems that we have is the problem of self-consciousness. The unique predicament of human beings is that we are self-conscious. Not only is it true that we are mortal and that we die, but most crucial is the reality that we know we will die. That's the unique predicament of human beings. And that's laid out in the story of Adam and Eve.”

Jordan Peterson

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ifi5KkXig3s "Biblical Series IV: Adam and Eve: Self-Consciousness, Evil, and Death"

Problem , Reality

“You've been doing it for a long time, and that's what people do. There are reasons the ritual came about, but the ritual lasts long after the reasons have been forgotten.”

Jordan Peterson

Other

People , Time

“The Bible presents a cataclysm at the beginning of time, which is the emergence of self-consciousness in human beings, which puts a rift in the structure of Being. That's the right way to think about it. That's given cosmic significance. You can dispense with that and say that nothing that happens to human beings is of cosmic significance, that we're these short lived, mold-like entities that are like cancers on this tiny little planet, rotating out in the middle of nowhere, on the edge of some unknown galaxy in the middle of infinite space, and nothing that happens to us matters. This is not a road that you can walk down and live well. For all intents and purposes, it's untrue. If fact, if you really walk down that road, and you take it really seriously, you end up not living at all. The kind of conclusions suicidal people draw about the utility of life prior to wishing for its cessation, are very much like the conclusions that you draw if you walk down that particular line of reasoning long enough.”

Jordan Peterson

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ifi5KkXig3s "Biblical Series IV: Adam and Eve: Self-Consciousness, Evil, and Death"

Life , People , Way , Thinking

“You can live your life two ways: You can use your language to manipulate. You can use it as a tool to get what you want. But the problem with that is that it assumes you know what you want, and that you're right. And that's a problem, because there's lots of things you don't know, and if you get what you want you may find that (A.) You didn't really want it, and (B.) that you're not the person that started the journey towards that. That happens a lot to people, especially when they use their language in a manipulative way.”

Jordan Peterson

Other

Life , People , Way , Problem

“When the aristocracy catches a cold, as it is said, the working class dies of pneumonia.”

Jordan Peterson book 12 Rules for Life

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, Rule 1: Stand up straight with your shoulders back

“Conflict, in turn, produces another problem: how to win or lose without the disagreeing parties incurring too great a cost. This latter point is particularly important. Imagine that two birds engage in a squabble about a desirable nesting area. The interaction can easily degenerate into outright physical combat. Under such circumstances, one bird, usually the largest, will eventually win—but even the victor may be hurt by the fight. That means a third bird, an undamaged, canny bystander, can move in, opportunistically, and defeat the now-crippled victor. That is not at all a good deal for the first two birds. Conflict—and Territory Over the millennia, animals who must co-habit with others in the same territories have in consequence learned many tricks to establish dominance, while risking the least amount of possible damage”

Jordan Peterson book 12 Rules for Life

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, Rule 1: Stand up straight with your shoulders back

Hurt , Imagination , Learning , Animals

“If you can bite, you generally don’t have to.”

Jordan Peterson book 12 Rules for Life

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, Rule 1: Stand up straight with your shoulders back

“Standards of better or worse are not illusory or unnecessary. If you hadn’t decided that what you are doing right now was better than the alternatives, you wouldn’t be doing it. The idea of a value-free choice is a contradiction in terms. Value judgments are a precondition for action. Furthermore, every activity, once chosen, comes with its own internal standards of accomplishment. If something can be done at all, it can be done better or worse.”

Jordan Peterson book 12 Rules for Life

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, Rule 4: Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today

Idea

“So, attend carefully to your posture. Quit drooping and hunching around. Speak your mind. Put your desires forward, as if you had a right to them—at least the same right as others. Walk tall and gaze forthrightly ahead. Dare to be dangerous. Encourage the serotonin to flow plentifully through the neural pathways desperate for its calming influence.”

Jordan Peterson book 12 Rules for Life

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, Rule 1: Stand up straight with your shoulders back

“Student: Drought, flooding and ocean recidification unanticipated for 65 million years all result from climate change according to over 700 of your fellow scientists so I was wondering whether you thought climate change could be an issue that would unite us all; left and right, moving us beyond debates, C-16 into discussions at the UN??? meets here next month where perhaps humanity might finally discover its global map of meaning.”

Jordan Peterson

Peterson: No.
Audience laughs and applauds
Talk At The Cambridge Union, 2nd November 2018

Change

“The first step, perhaps, is to take stock. Who are you? When you buy a house and prepare to live in it, you hire an inspector to list all its faults—as it is, in reality, now, not as you wish it could be. You’ll even pay him for the bad news. You need to know. You need to discover the home’s hidden flaws. You need to know whether they are cosmetic imperfections or structural inadequacies. You need to know because you can’t fix something if you don’t know it’s broken— and you’re broken. You need an inspector. The internal critic—it could play that role, if you could get it on track; if you and it could cooperate.”

Jordan Peterson book 12 Rules for Life

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, Rule 4: Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today

Home , Bad luck , Reality , Housing

“What does opening your eyes and realizing your vulnerability have to do with the knowledge of good and evil?”

Jordan Peterson

Here's the key: You know you're vulnerable. No other animal knows that. You know what hurts you, because you're vulnerable. And now that you know what hurts you, you can figure out what hurts someone else. And as soon as you know what can hurt someone as, and you can use that, then you have the knowledge of good and evil. Well it's a pretty good trick that the snake pulled because it doesn't seem like the thing that we would have exactly wanted if we knew what the consequence was going to be. As soon as a human being is self conscious and aware of his nakedness, then he has the capacity for evil. That's introduced into the world right at that point."
Concepts

Knowledge , Evil

“This is why you're wasting your life away.”

Jordan Peterson

Other

Life

“...to be redeemed to aim at the highest value, to sacrifice what's no longer uses, existence on a deep state of meaning that”

Jordan Peterson

"Well and if we all got our act together collectively and stopped making things worse; because that’s another thing people do all the time. Not only do they not do what they should to make things better, they actively attempt to make things worse because they’re spiteful, or resentful, or arrogant, or deceitful, or homicidal, or genocidal, or all of those things all bundled together in an absolutely pathological package. If people stopped really, really trying just to make things worse, we have no idea how much better they would get just because of that."
Other

“Believe that you have somethikng important to contribute to the world, and that the world would be a lesser place without that contribution.”

Jordan Peterson

YouTube: Advice to Young Men in Their 20s | Jordan and Mikhaila Peterson (2021)
Other

World

“Group identity can be fractionated right down to the level of the individual.”

Jordan Peterson book 12 Rules for Life

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, Rule 11: Do not bother children when they are skateboarding

“If you want to find out whether the person is there or the ideology is there, you listen to see if you're hearing anything that someone else with the same ideological mindset couldn't have told you.”

Jordan Peterson

https://www.youtube.com/V32WHDuy-Do?t=904
Other

Personality

“Freud was, after all, a genius. You can tell that because people still hate him.”

Jordan Peterson book 12 Rules for Life

"Rule 9: Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don't"
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

Hate , People

“Women are attracted to men's ability to generate, to be productive, and to share. These qualities transcend wealth, which can disappear.”

Jordan Peterson

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ifi5KkXig3s "Biblical Series IV: Adam and Eve: Self-Consciousness, Evil, and Death"

Wealth , Women , Men

“You should watch when you talk to young men about responsibility. They're so thrilled about it. It just blows me away. Really?! That's what the counter-culture is? Grow up and do something useful. "Really? I can do that? Oh, I'm so excited by that idea. No one ever mentioned that before."”

Jordan Peterson

Rights, rights, rights, rights… Jesus! It's appalling. People have had enough of that. And they better have, because it's a non-productive mode of being. Responsibility, man: that's where the meaning in life is.
Other

Idea , Men

“The thing that's so interesting about being alive is that you're all in. No matter what you do you're all in; this is gonna kill you. So I think you might as well play the most magnificent game you can while you're waiting—because, do you have anything better to do, really?”

Jordan Peterson

"2017 Maps of Meaning 12: Final: The Divinity of the Individual" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6V1eMvGGcXQ&t=0s
Lectures

Game , Waiting , Thinking

“Human beings have this peculiar capacity that no other creatures have: I know how I can be hurt, because I am aware of my own limitations–painfully aware—and now, because I know how I can be hurt, I know how you can be hurt, and I can take advantage of that. And that's how evil enters the world.”

Jordan Peterson

Unsourced

Hurt , World , Evil

“Embodied imitation and dramatic abstraction constituted the ground out of which higher abstract cognition emerged. How else could it be? Clearly we were mostly bodies before we were minds. Clearly. And so we were acting out things way before we understood them.”

Jordan Peterson

"Biblical Series III: God and the Hierarchy of Authority" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_GPAl_q2QQ
Lectures, Biblical Lectures

Way

“Those who break the rules ethically are those who have mastered them first and disciplined themselves to understand the necessity of those rules, and break them in keeping with the spirit rather than the letter of the law.”

Jordan Peterson book Beyond Order

Source: Books, Beyond Order (2021), p. 85

Law , Understanding

“[T]he great genie, the granter of wishes—God, in a microcosm—is archetypally trapped in the tiny confines of a lamp and subject, as well, to the will of the lamp’s current holder. Genie—genius—is the combination of possibility and potential, and extreme constraint.”

Jordan Peterson book Beyond Order

Source: Books, Beyond Order (2021), pp. 35–36

God

“It has taken since time immemorial for us to organize ourselves, biologically and socially, into the functional hierarchies that both specify our perceptions and actions, and define our interactions with the natural and social world. Profound gratitude for that gift is the only proper response.”

Jordan Peterson book Beyond Order

Source: Books, Beyond Order (2021), p. 34

World , Time , Gratitude , Nature

“Every explorer is therefore, by necessity, a revolutionary, and every successful revolutionary is a peacemaker.”

Jordan Peterson book Maps of Meaning

Source: Books, Maps of Meaning (1999), p. 179

Success

“Behavior is imitated, then abstracted into play, formalized into drama and story, crystallized into myth and codified into religion—and only then criticized in philosophy, and provided, post-hoc, with rational underpinnings.”

Jordan Peterson book Maps of Meaning

Source: Books, Maps of Meaning (1999), p. 78

Religion , Behavior

“I think it is reasonable to posit that it is often the people who have had too easy a time—who have been pampered and elevated falsely in their self-esteem—who adopt the role of victim and the mien of resentment.”

Jordan Peterson book Beyond Order

Source: Books, Beyond Order (2021), p. 339

Time , People , Falseness , Thinking

“I have camped where the grizzly bears were plentiful. It is nice that they are on the planet and all that, but I prefer my grizzlies shy, not too hungry, and far enough away to be picturesque.”

Jordan Peterson book Beyond Order

Source: Books, Beyond Order (2021), p. 315

“There are three fundamental states of social being: tyranny (you do what I want), slavery (I do what you want), or negotiation.”

Jordan Peterson book Beyond Order

Source: Books, Beyond Order (2021), p. 278

“Although Christ commits many acts that might be considered revolutionary, as we discussed in Rule I, He is nonetheless explicitly portrayed in the Gospels as the master of tradition.”

Jordan Peterson book Beyond Order

Source: Books, Beyond Order (2021), p. 197

Christ

“It was the bringing together of a warring multiplicity under the unifying doctrines of Christianity that civilized Europe.”

Jordan Peterson book Beyond Order

Source: Books, Beyond Order (2021), p. 191

War

“It is far better to become something than to remain anything but become nothing.”

Jordan Peterson book Beyond Order

Source: Books, Beyond Order (2021), p. 188

“To write something long, sophisticated, and coherent means, at least in part, to become more complex, articulate, and deeper in personality.”

Jordan Peterson book Beyond Order

Source: Books, Beyond Order (2021), p. 185

Personality , Parting

“If you aim at nothing, you become plagued by everything.”

Jordan Peterson book Beyond Order

Source: Books, Beyond Order (2021), p. 184

“Like God, however, ideology is dead. The bloody excesses of the twentieth century killed it.”

Jordan Peterson book Beyond Order

Source: Books, Beyond Order (2021), p. 177

God , Dead