Famous quotes
Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,158,269 quotes Who coined it · How we decide
EnglishItalianoPolskiעבריתFrançaisPortuguêsفارسیEspañol中文РусскийDeutschالعربيةहिन्दी日本語ΕλληνικάLatina
Jordan Peterson
130 quotes
“Proof itself, of any sort, is impossible, without an axiom (as Gödel proved). Thus faith in God is a prerequisite for all proof.”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Twitter, November 25, 2013
“First stop lying, then start speaking the truth.”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the things that struck me as near miraculous about music, especially in a rather nihilistic and atheistic society, is that it really does fill the void that was left by the death of God. And it's partly because you cannot rationally critique music. It speaks to you, it speaks of meaning, and no matter what you say about it, no matter how cynical you are, you cannot put a crowbar underneath that and lift it up and toss it aside.”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Competence can step in where popularity cannot go.”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The richest province in Canada is poorer than the poorest state in the United States”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) first seen 2025 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Canada's richest province is not 'poorer than poorest' US state" AFP Fact Check (March 25, 2025)
“The future is the place of all potential monsters.”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And the fact that in the United States [...] the students have been essentially handed a bill of indentured servitude here for their student loans is absolutely beyond comprehension. It seems to me that the bureaucracy has basically conspired to determine how to pick the pockets of the students' future earnings and they do that by offering them an extended adolescence with no quality control.”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Modern Times: Camille Paglia & Jordan B Peterson" (at 13m41s), Jordan B Peterson podcast, 3 October 2017
“I believe that when these podcasts work properly, the reason they are compelling, to the degree they manage to be compelling, is because what people are observing and participating in is the process by which two people mutually transform one another towards a higher good, so we are both struggling to make things clear and to approach something that we don't have yet, but it's in that struggle that motivation rises.”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) first seen 2021 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Journalist or Heretic? | Bari Weiss | The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - S4: E29" (at 1h58m33s), The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast, 10 June 2021.
“I would say with regard to critical thought, and to some degree with regard to productive thought, an indeterminate proportion of that is dependent on speech. I don't think it's unreasonable to point out that thought is internalized speech. And that the dialectical process that constitutes critical thinking is internalized speech. […] The quality of our thoughts is actually dependent on our ability to speak our minds.”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) first seen 2021 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Free Speech and the Satirical Activist | Andrew Doyle | The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - S4: E32 (at 23m53s), The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast, 21 June 2021
“The truth is something that burns—it burns off deadwood, and people don't like having their deadwood burnt off, often because they're 95% deadwood.”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When you try to analyze the operation of the set of ideas, you ought to find out first who the current proponents are in the conversation that's going on now. But then you need to trace it back to deeper ideas and the philosophers, and sometimes the theologians even (depending on how deep you go), from whom those ideas flow. And in order to understand the entire structure of the system of ideas and its interrelationships, so that you can understand its motivation and its nature, you have to delve deeper into the underlying history of the ideas.”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) first seen 2022 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Critical Racists | Christopher Rufo | #280" (at 12m36s), The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast, 18 August 2022
“Lex Fridman: How often do you gaze upon death, your own? How often do you remember, remind yourself that this ride ends? Jordan Peterson: Personally? Lex Fridman: Personally. Jordan Peterson: All the time. Lex Fridman: 'Cause you as a deep thinker and philosopher, it's easy to start philosophizing and forgetting that you might die today. Jordan Peterson: The angel of death sits on every word. How's that? Lex Fridman: How often do you actually consciously— Jordan Peterson: All the time. Lex Fridman: —notice the angel? Jordan Peterson: All the time.”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) first seen 2022 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Jordan Peterson: Life, Death, Power, Fame, and Meaning (32:18), Lex Fridman Podcast #313, 19 August 2022
“Part of the reason that politicians have come to believe that the public is stupid and has no attention span is that television had a 30-second attention span. So you had to assume your audience remembered nothing, knew nothing, and could flip out to a different channel at any moment. Plus the bandwidth was insanely expensive. Now all that is gone. I think that will be a revolution in political discourse.”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) first seen 2023 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: GOP Debate 1: Highlights, Lowlights & Reaction with Jordan Peterson | DIRECT MESSAGE | Rubin Report" (at 37m24s), The Rubin Report, 24 Aug 2023.
“[About what Canadians may think about him being ordered, in 2023, to undergo social media communication coaching:] Either someone like me is wrong, or all of the institutions in Canada have become dangerously corrupt. Well, who the hell is going to believe the second one?”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) first seen 2023 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: GOP Debate 1: Highlights, Lowlights & Reaction with Jordan Peterson | DIRECT MESSAGE | Rubin Report" (at 47m25s), The Rubin Report, 24 Aug 2023.
“A huge problem on the social media side is that we put undue access to status in the hands of people who will misuse accusations to garner attention.”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) first seen 2023 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Rife For Cancellation | Matt Rife | EP 401" (at 37m48s), Jordan B Peterson on YouTube, 30 November 2023.
“Why would a dragon hoard gold? Because a dragon represents everything that you're afraid of. What's embedded in everything that you're afraid of? Absolutely everything that you need to find. Run from what you're afraid of? Run from exactly what you need to find.”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I regard free speech as a prerequisite to a civilized society, because freedom of speech means that you can have combat with words. That's what it means. It doesn't mean that people can happily and gently exchange opinions. It means that we can engage in combat with words, in the battleground of ideas. And the reason that that's acceptable, and why it's acceptable that people's feelings get hurt during that combat, is that the combat of ideas is far preferable to actual combat.”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 2017 Maps of Meaning 03: Marionettes and Individuals (Part 2)
“You can kill people with compassion. That's the Freudian Oedipal situation. Think about working in a nursing home. There's a rule of thumb that we can use as a guide when interacting with people in general. It is this: Do not do anything for anyone that they can do themselves. You just steal it from them. Imagine that you're working with elderly people. It might be easier to do something for them than to let them struggle through it. But you just speed their demise by taking away their last vestiges of independence. People do the same thing with kids. The answer is: struggle through it.”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 2017 Maps of Meaning 03: Marionettes and Individuals (Part 2)
“Do you want to be what you are or do you want to be what continually changes what you are?”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 2017 Maps of Meaning 11: The Flood and the Tower
“It's so interesting to watch the young men when you talk to them about responsibility. They're so goddamned thrilled about it. It just blows me away. It's like, "Really?!" That's the counterculture: Grow the hell up and do something useful! "Really? I can do that? Oh, I'm so excited by that idea! No one ever mentioned that before!" It's like, "Rights, rights, rights, rights…" Jesus! It's appalling. People have had enough of that. And they better have, because it's a non-productive mode of being. Responsibility, man: that's where the meaning in life is.”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 2017 Maps of Meaning 11: The Flood and the Tower
“The thing that's so interesting about being alive is that you're all in. No matter what you do you're all in; this is gonna kill you. So I think you might as well play the most magnificent game you can while you're waiting—because, do you have anything better to do, really?”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 2017 Maps of Meaning 12: Final: The Divinity of the Individual
“Here's how you can tell someone is your friend: A) You can tell them bad news, and they'll listen. B) You can tell them good news, and they'll help you celebrate.”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 2017 Personality 21: Performance Prediction
“People camouflage against the herd. People aren't after happiness, they're after not hurting.”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 2017 Personality 21: Performance Prediction
“Life is suffering. Love is the desire to see unnecessary suffering ameliorated. Truth is the handmaiden of love. Dialogue is the pathway to truth. Humility is recognition of personal insufficiency and the willingness to learn. To learn is to die voluntarily and be born again, in great ways and small. So speech must be untrammeled, so that dialogue can take place, so that we can all humbly learn, so that truth can serve love, so that suffering can be ameliorated, so that we can all stumble forward to the Kingdom of God.”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the things Jung said is that everybody acts out a myth, but very few people know what their myth is, and you should know what your myth is, because it might be a tragedy, and maybe you don't want it to be.”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everyone woke up and said, or thought, something like, "How is it that we came to believe any of this?" It’s like waking up one day and noting that you really don’t know why you put a Christmas tree up, but you’ve been doing it for a long time, and that’s what people do. There are reasons Christmas trees came about. The ritual lasts long after the reasons have been forgotten.”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Dante was trying to get to the bottom of what constitutes evil. There's a hierarchy of reprehensible behavior, and Dante thought it was betrayal. And I think that's right, because I believe the fundamental human resource is trust.”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There's no difference between the conquering of the unknown and the creation of habitable order.”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Most of the adventure genre is about how there is some enemy that's lurking, and someone rises up to confront it and maintain order. There's no getting away from that story.”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Something that's everything lacks limitation. There are advantages to not being able to do things. If you had everything you wanted at every moment at your fingertips, then there's nothing. There's no story. It's like Superman being able to bounces hydrogen bombs off of him. The whole series died because he didn't have any flaws. There's no story without limitation.”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If religion was "the opium of the masses," then communism was the methamphetamine of the masses.”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The eternal dragon is always giving our fallen-down castles a rough time—always.”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our ideas emerged out of the ground of our action over thousands and thousands of years. And when philosophers were putting forth those ideas, what they were doing wasn't generating creative ideas—they were just telling the story of humanity. It's already there. It's already in us. It's already in our patterns of behavior.”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Embodied imitation and dramatic abstraction constituted the ground out of which higher abstract cognition emerged. How else could it be? Clearly we were mostly bodies before we were minds. Clearly. And so we were acting out things way before we understood them.”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And then Snow White has to wait for the Prince to come rescue her, and you think: "How sexist can you get, that story?" Well, seriously, because that's the way that that would be read in the modern world, like, "She doesn't need a prince to come rescue her." That's why Disney made Frozen, that absolutely appalling piece of rubbish.”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Bible is a collective attempt by humanity to solve the deepest problems that we have. The deepest of all problems that we have is the problem of self-consciousness. The unique predicament of human beings is that we are self-conscious. Not only is it true that we are mortal and that we die, but most crucial is the reality that we know we will die.”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To come up with the idea that you can bargain with the future is the major idea of humankind. We suffer. What do we do about it? We figure out how to bargain with the future. And we minimize suffering in that manner.”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Your values have to be hierarchically organized with something absolute at the top, because otherwise they do nothing but war. This is true if you're an individual and it's true if you're a state. If you don't know what the next thing you should do is, then there are 50 things you should do. Then, how are you doing to do any of them? You can't. You have to prioritize. Something has to be above something else. It has to be arranged in a hierarchy for it not to be chaotic, so there is some principle at the top of the hierarchy.”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The idea that paradise, the proper habitat of a human being, is a walled garden is a good one. It's an echo back to the chaos/order idea. Walls: culture. Garden: nature. The proper human habitat is a properly tended garden.”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A thing isn't quite real until you name it.”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Without that forward-going, courageous consciousness, a woman herself will drift into unconsciousness and terror. It's the sleep of the naïve and damned. She needs to wake herself up and bring her own masculine consciousness into the forefront so she can survive in the world. Unless woman is taken out of man, then she isn't a human being—she's just a creature.”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Women are attracted to men's ability to generate, to be productive, and to share. These qualities transcend wealth, which can disappear.”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The selection pressure that women placed on men developed the entire species. There's two things that happened. The men competed for competence, since the male hierarchy is a mechanism that pushes the best men to the top. The effect of that is multiplied by the fact that women who are hypergamous peel from the top. And so the males who are the most competent are much more likely to leave offspring—which seems to have driven cortical expansion.”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The intellect is the most incredible human capacity. It is the highest of all human capacities, actually. However, it is also the thing that can go most terribly wrong, because the intellect can become arrogant about its own existence and its accomplishments, and it can fall in love with its own products. That's what happens with ideologies. You become obsessed with a human-constructed dogma of which you believe is 100% right, and it eradicates the necessity of anything transcendent.”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The idea is that you could sacrifice something of value, and that would have transcendent utility. That is by no means an unsophisticated idea. In fact, it might be the greatest idea that human beings ever came up with.”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Of course, my socialist colleagues and I weren’t out to hurt anyone. Quite the reverse. We were out to improve things—but we were going to start with other people. I came to see the temptation in this logic, the obvious flaw, the danger—but could also see that it did not exclusively characterize socialism. Anyone who was out to change the world by changing others was to be regarded with suspicion. The temptations of such a position were too great to be resisted.”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Behavior is imitated, then abstracted into play, formalized into drama and story, crystallized into myth and codified into religion—and only then criticized in philosophy, and provided, post-hoc, with rational underpinnings.”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every explorer is therefore, by necessity, a revolutionary, and every successful revolutionary is a peacemaker.”
Jordan Peterson (born 1962) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source