Jordan Peterson

“You can think of the entire Internet as a place where ideas embodied in cyberspace are having a war, and it's not much different than the war of gods in heaven, which has been taking place since there's been human beings.”

“I'm a practical person. I'm not too bad a carpenter. I can renovate houses.”

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

“Our physiological constitution is obviously a product of Darwinian processes, insofar as you buy the evolutional theory as a generative, as an account of the mechanism that generated us. Our physiology evolved, our behaviors evolved, and our accounts of those behaviors, both successful and unsuccessful, evolved.”

“You can't go backward in life.”

“'Happiness' is a pointless goal.”

“The narrow bandwidth of TV has made us think that we are stupider than we are.”

“I've known for years that the university underserved the community, because we assumed that university education is for 18- to 22-year-olds, which is a proposition that's so absurd it is absolutely mind-boggling that anyone ever conceptualized it. Why wouldn't you take university courses throughout your entire life?”

“Don't lie about anything, ever. Lying leads to Hell.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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!”

“Whether or not I like a piece of data has very little bearing on whether or not I am likely to accept it.”

“Free speech is not just another value. It's the foundation of Western civilization.”

“If you're a social scientist worth your salt, you never do a univariate analysis.”

“I'm always surprised when people respond positively to what I am saying, given its seriousnessness and strange nature.”

“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.”

“The right-wingers don't want to admit that for some people, there are no jobs; they think that conscientiousness in and of itself will do the trick.”

“If the standard transsexual person wants to be regarded as he or she, my sense is I'll address you according to the part that you appear to be playing.”