Jordan Peterson Quotes

[First opening statement:] To read something you don’t just follow the words and follow the meaning, but you take apart the sentences and you ask yourself at this level of phrase and at the level of sentence and the level of paragraph, “Is this true? Are there counter-arguments that can be put forward that are credible? Is this solid thinking?”
And I have to tell you, and I’m not trying to be flippant here, that I have rarely read a tract that made as many conceptual errors per sentence as The Communist Manifesto. It was quite a miraculous re-read. And it was interesting to think about it psychologically as well, because I’ve read student papers that were of the same ilk in some sense, although I’m not suggesting that they were of the same level of glittering literary brilliance and polemic quality. And I also understand that The Communist Manifesto was a call for revolution and not a standard logical argument, but that notwithstanding I have some things to say about the authors psychologically.
The first thing is that is doesn’t seem to me that either Marx or Engels grappled with this particular fundamental truth, which is that almost all ideas are wrong. And it doesn’t matter if they're your ideas or someone else’s ideas; they’re probably wrong. And even if they strike you with the force of brilliance, your job is to assume first of all that they’re probably wrong and then to assault them with everything you have in your arsenal and see if they can survive. And what struck me about The Communist Manifesto was akin to something Jung said about typical thinking and this was the thinking of people who were not trained to think. He said that the typical thinker has a thought; it appears to them like an object might appear in a room; the thought appears and they just accept it as true. They don't go the second step, which is to think about the thinking. And that's the real essence of critical thinking. And so that's what you try to teach people in university, to read a text and think about it critically—not to destroy the utility of the text, but to separate the wheat from the chaff.
And so what I tried to do when I was reading The Communist Manifesto was to separate the wheat from the chaff. And I'm afraid I found some wheat, yes, but mostly chaff, and I'm going to explain why, hopefully in relatively short order.

You are by no means only what you already know. You are also all that which you could know, if you only would. Thus, you should never sacrifice what you could be for what you are. You should never give up the better that resides within for the security you already have — and certainly not when you have already caught a glimpse, an undeniable glimpse, of something beyond.

Much that is great starts small, ignorant, and useless. […] But today’s beginner is tomorrow’s master.

Humility: It is better to presume ignorance and invite learning than to assume sufficient knowledge and risk the consequent blindness.

begin by treating yourself as if you were someone you were responsible for helping.

I think the idea of white privilege is absolutely reprehensible. And it's not because white people aren't privileged. You know, we have all sorts of privileges, and most people have privileges of all sorts, and you should be grateful for your privileges and work to deserve them, I would say. But the idea that you can target an ethnic group with a collective crime, regardless of the specific innocence or guilt of the constituent elements of that group—there is absolutely nothing that's more racist than that. It's absolutely abhorrent.

You should be able to do things that you wouldn't do. That's the definition of a genuinely moral person. They could do it, but they don't.

I know that the evidence for genuine religious experience is incontrovertible, but it's not explicable. So I don't want to explain it away. I want to pull back from that and leave it as a fact and a mystery, and then we're going to look at this from a rational perspective, and say that the initial formulation of the idea of God was an attempt to abstract out the ideal and to consider it as an abstraction outside its instantiation. And that's good enough. It's an amazing thing if it's true. But I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

One of the problems with being relatively wealthy if you are a parent is that you cannot provide your children with necessity.

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.

When you move, everything is up in the air, at least for a while. It’s stressful, but in the chaos there are new possibilities. People, including you, can’t hem you in with their old notions. You get shaken out of your ruts

Michelangelo’s great perfect marble David cries out to its observer: “You could be more than you are.

The light that you discover in your life is proportionate to the amount of the darkness you are willing to forthrightly confront (from the debate between Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Zizek)

I dreamed I saw my maternal grandmother sitting by the bank of a swimming pool, that was also a river. In real life, she had been a victim of Alzheimer’s disease, and had regressed, before her death, to a semi-conscious state. In the dream, as well, she had lost her capacity for self-control. Her genital region was exposed, dimly; it had the appearance of a thick mat of hair. She was stroking herself, absent-mindedly. She walked over to me, with a handful of pubic hair, compacted into something resembling a large artist’s paint-brush. She pushed this at my face. I raised my arm, several times, to deflect her hand; finally, unwilling to hurt her, or interfere with her any farther, I let her have her way. She stroked my face with the brush, gently, and said, like a child, “isn’t it soft?” I looked at her ruined face and said, “yes, Grandma, it’s soft.

St. George is the hero who goes out to confront the dragon, and he frees the virgin from its grasp. I would say that's a pretty straightforward story about the sexual attractiveness of the masculine spirit that's willing to forthrightly encounter the unknown. It is a straight biological representation to me, and it's a really, really old story. It's the oldest written story we have, and it's basically the ancient Mesopotamian creation myth, the Enuma Elish, which basically plays out that story. You've seen this story played out a hundred different ways, and you never get tired of it, because it's the central story of mankind.