Jordan Peterson Quotes

Jordan Peterson is widely regarded as one of the most influential public intellectuals of the 21st century; his ideas have gathered an immense following in various parts of the world. Peterson has a long history of personal and professional achievements in the fields of psychology and psychotherapy, public speaking, and writing about various aspects of human existence. 

Table of Contents:

1. Early Life and Education

2. Professional Career

3. Public Profile

4. Popular Ideas

5. Legacy

6. Jordan Peterson Quotes 

1. Early Life and Education

Jordan Peterson was born in 1959 in Alberta, Canada. His educational pursuits began early in life; at the age of 18, Peterson entered the University of Alberta to study psychology. After graduating with honors in 1982, Peterson went on to pursue doctoral studies in clinical psychology at McGill University in Montreal. In 1991, he became the first tenured professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, where he worked for more than 25 years.

2. Professional Career

Peterson’s professional activities have been mainly devoted to clinical psychology and psychotherapy. In addition to his role as a professor at the University of Toronto, Peterson was a psychologist in private practice for many years, working directly with individuals and couples in need of psychological guidance. In 1998, he founded a clinic dedicated to helping people with psychological distress or addiction to drugs or alcohol.

3. Public Profile

Peterson burst into the public consciousness in 2016 with the release of his bestselling book, “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos”. The book was well received, selling millions of copies worldwide. Following the book’s success, Peterson gained popularity as a public speaker, delivering lectures at universities and giving TED talks. In 2019, he launched the online educational platform, “Thinkspot”, which aims to offer an alternative to the mainstream educational system.

4. Popular Ideas

Peterson’s central themes revolve largely around personal responsibility, individual autonomy, and finding meaning in life through self-discipline. He encourages individuals to make a conscious effort to evaluate their own memories and relationships and strive for excellence in their tasks and commitments. He is highly critical of postmodernism, advocating that citizens should take an active role in defending the truth in a world increasingly becoming dominated by relativism and “groupthink”.

5. Legacy

Peterson has been described as one of the most influential thinkers of the 21st century. He is credited with reviving interest in classical philosophies such as Aristotelian ethics, Stoicism, and Existentialism and bridging ancient wisdom with modern-day science and technology. His teachings have had an undeniable impact on the lives of many individuals around the world and his ideas are likely to remain relevant for many years to come.

Jordan Peterson Quotes

“No one gets away with anything, ever, so take responsibility for your own life.” – Jordan Peterson

“Power is competence.” – Jordan Peterson

“In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion-, and even nation-centered cultures.” – Jordan Peterson

“Don’t be dependent. At all. Ever. Period.” – Jordan Peterson

“Don’t compare yourself with other people; compare yourself with who you were yesterday.” – Jordan Peterson

“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.” – Jordan Peterson

“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!” – Jordan Peterson

“The idea that women were oppressed throughout history is an appalling theory.” – Jordan Peterson

“I am not going to be a mouthpiece for language that I detest.” – Jordan Peterson

“A properly balanced story provides an equal representation of the negative and positive attributes of, I could say the world, but it’s actually a being. ‘Harry Potter”s a good example. So Harry’s the hero, right? But he’s tainted with evil. There’s a dark and light in every bit of that narrative. It’s well-balanced.” – Jordan Peterson

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

“You may say, ‘Well, dragons don’t exist.’ It’s, like, yes they do – the category ‘predator’ and the category ‘dragon’ are the same categories. It absolutely exists. It’s a superordinate category. It exists absolutely more than anything else. In fact, it really exists.” – Jordan Peterson

“Don’t lie about anything, ever. Lying leads to Hell.” – Jordan Peterson

“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.” – Jordan Peterson

“It’s in the best interest of the radical left types – best psychological and strategic interest – to refuse to admit to the possibility that reasonable people can object to their ideological staff. Because if reasonable people objected, that would imply that their ideological stance is not reasonable.” – 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.” – Jordan Peterson

“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.” – Jordan Peterson

“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 socioeconomic status more than women.” – Jordan Peterson

“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.” – Jordan Peterson

“I happen to be a big fan of Western civilization; I think it beats the hell out of tyranny and starvation.” – Jordan Peterson

“If you’re a social scientist worth your salt, you never do a univariate analysis.” – Jordan Peterson

“Self-love is the only antidote to the chaos of existence. And if you don’t love and care for yourself and your own needs, you will cause unnecessary suffering both for yourself and others.” – Jordan Peterson

“We deserve some respect. You deserve some respect. You are important to other people, as much as to yourself.” – Jordan Peterson

“There’s no doubt that inequality destabilizes societies. I think the social science evidence on that front is crystal clear.” – Jordan Peterson

“I’m always surprised when people respond positively to what I am saying, given its seriousness and strange nature.” – Jordan Peterson

“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.’” – Jordan Peterson

“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.’” – Jordan Peterson

“It is more difficult to rule yourself than to rule a city.” – Jordan Peterson

“Become aware of your own insufficiency.” – Jordan Peterson

“You can’t just slander someone, defame them, lie about them. You can’t incite people to crime. There are all sorts of reasonable restrictions on free speech that are already codified in the British common-law system.” – Jordan Peterson

“The connection between psychology, mythology, and literature is as important as the connection between psychology and biology and the hard sciences.” – Jordan Peterson

“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.” – Jordan Peterson

“Music has an intrinsic meaning, which has always been mysterious to me.” – Jordan Peterson

“You can’t go backward in life.” – Jordan Peterson

“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.” – Jordan Peterson

“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.” – Jordan Peterson

“Free speech is not just another value. It’s the foundation of Western civilization.” – Jordan Peterson

“If you learn a martial art, you learn to be dangerous, but simultaneously, you learn to control it.” – Jordan Peterson

“Accept the terrible responsibility of life with eyes wide open.” – Jordan Peterson

“People have been fed this diet of pabulum, rights, and impulsive freedom. There’s just absolute starvation for the other side of the story.” – Jordan Peterson

“If you don’t stand your ground, then all that happens is people push you backward.” – Jordan Peterson

“That’s another hallmark of truth, is that it snaps things together. People write to me all the time and say it’s as if things were coming together in my mind. It’s like the Platonic idea that all learning was remembering. You have a nature, and when you feel that nature articulated, it’s like the act of snapping the puzzle pieces together.” – Jordan Peterson

“‘Happiness‘ is a pointless goal.” – Jordan Peterson

“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.” – Jordan Peterson

“It’s very difficult to regulate yourself, and if you learn to do that, well, it starts to spill over.” – Jordan Peterson

“Life is tragic. You are tiny and flawed and ignorant and weak, and everything else is huge, complex, and overwhelming.” – Jordan Peterson

“The truth is something that burns. It burns off deadwood. And people don’t like having the deadwood burnt off, often because they’re 95 percent deadwood.” – Jordan Peterson

“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?” – Jordan Peterson

“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.” – Jordan Peterson

“When you start to realize how much of what you’ve constructed of yourself is based on deception and lies, that is a horrifying realization.” – Jordan Peterson

“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.” – Jordan Peterson

“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.” – Jordan Peterson

It makes sense that a witch lives in a swamp.

“If you’re going to be successful you need to be smart, conscientious, and tough.”

“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.”

“It’s very hard to find your own words – and you don’t actually exist until you have your own words.” – Jordan Peterson

“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.” – Jordan Peterson

“People have this capacity within them to set the world straight.” – Jordan Peterson

“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.” – Jordan Peterson

“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.” – Jordan Peterson

“The masculine spirit is under assault. It’s obvious.” – Jordan Peterson

“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.” – Jordan Peterson

“To master a new technology, you have to play with it.” – Jordan Peterson

“We have to rediscover the eternal values and then live them out.” – Jordan Peterson

“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.” – Jordan Peterson

“It’s not proper for the government to intrude too thoroughly into the domain of the family. It’s inappropriate.” – Jordan Peterson

“You have to listen very carefully and tell the truth if you are going to get a paranoid person to open up to you.” – Jordan Peterson

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