“ 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 histo… Jonathan Haidt
“ Loyalty, respect for authority and some degree of sanctification create a more binding social order that places some limits on individualism and egoism. Jonathan Haidt
“ Trying to run Congress without human relationships is like trying to run a car without motor oil. Should we be surprised when the whole thing freezes up? Jonathan Haidt
“ I think Republicans need to take income inequality more seriously. Not because I favor equality of outcomes. I do not. I think the Right is correct to stress merit and earned rewards, not handouts and… Jonathan Haidt
“ Cultural change works orders of magnitude faster then genetic change. Stephen Jay Gould Jonathan Haidt
“ It really is a fact that liberals are much higher than conservatives on a major personality trait called 'openness to experience.' People who are high on openness to experience just crave novelty, var… Jonathan Haidt
“ When opponents of evolution object that human beings are not mere apes, they are correct. We are also part bee. Jonathan Haidt
“ Morality binds people into groups. It gives us tribalism, it gives us genocide, war, and politics. But it also gives us heroism, altruism, and sainthood. Jonathan Haidt
“ A few hundred million years later, some of these eukaryotes developed a novel adaptation: they stayed together after cell division to form multicellular organisms in which every cell had exactly the s… Jonathan Haidt
“ The ethic of autonomy is based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, autonomous individuals with wants, needs, and preferences. People should be free to satisfy these wants, needs, and pref… Jonathan Haidt
“ Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well. —EPICTETUS Jonathan Haidt
“ Religiosity developed because successful religions made groups more efficient at turning resources into offspring." (including art, cathedrals, cities, earthworks, etc?) Jonathan Haidt
“ Leo Tolstoy wrote: One can live magnificently in this world, if one knows how to work and how to love, to work for the person one loves and to love one’s work.19 Jonathan Haidt
“ As I continued to read the writings of conservative intellectuals, from Edmund Burke in the eighteenth century through Friedrich Hayek and Thomas Sowell in the twentieth, I began to see that they had… Jonathan Haidt
“ European travelers to every continent witnessed people coming together to dance with wild abandon around a fire, synchronized to the beat of drums, often to the point of exhaustion. In Dancing in the… Jonathan Haidt
“ But if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared… Jonathan Haidt
“ Everyone cares about fairness, but there are two major kinds. On the left, fairness often implies equality, but on the right it means proportionality —people should be rewarded in proportion to what t… Jonathan Haidt
“ The emotion of disgust evolved initially to optimize responses to the omnivore's dilemma. Individuals who had a properly calibrated sense of disgust were able to consume more calories than their overl… Jonathan Haidt
