Jonathan Haidt Quotes

Love and work are to people what water and sunshine are to plants.

The rider evolved to serve to the elephant.

The president is the high priest of what sociologist Robert Bellah calls the 'American civil religion.' The president must invoke the name of God (though not Jesus), glorify America's heroes and history,quote its sacred texts (the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution), and perform the transubstantiation of pluribus unum.

Religiosity developed because successful religions made groups more efficient at turning resources into offspring." (including art, cathedrals, cities, earthworks, etc?)

The most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation - a force for construction and destruction.

Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason.

Sports is to war as pornography is to sex.

Loyalty, respect for authority and some degree of sanctification create a more binding social order that places some limits on individualism and egoism.

Groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies.

Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

Understanding the simple fact that morality differs around the world, and even within societies, is the first step toward understanding your righteous mind.

You can see the rider serving the elephant when people are morally dumbfounded. They have strong gut feelings about what is right and wrong, and they struggle to construct post hoc justifications for those feelings. Even when the servant (reasoning) comes back empty-handed, the master (intuition) doesn't change his judgment.

The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider's job is to serve the elephant.

Moral matrices bind people together and blind them to the coherence, or even existence, of other matrices. This makes it very difficult for people to consider the possibility that there might really be more than one form of moral truth, or more than one valid framework for judging people or running a society.