Jordan Peterson Quotes

Jordan Peterson is a clinical psychologist, professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, and author. He is known for his controversial stances on political correctness, gender identity, and postmodernism. Jordan has become a very popular figure in recent years, with millions of people watching his lectures on YouTube. Jordan’s quotes are both thought-provoking and insightful, offering a unique perspective on life that is worth exploring. Here are some of the best quotes from Jordan Peterson that will be sure to make you think.

  • 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

  • I am not going to be a mouthpiece for language that I detest.

    Jordan Peterson

  • Accept the terrible responsibility of life with eyes wide open.

    Jordan Peterson

  • Don’t be dependent. At all. Ever. Period.

    Jordan Peterson

  • Become aware of your own insufficiency.

    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

  • Life is very difficult. One of the most ancient of religious ideas that emerges everywhere, I would say, is that life is essentially suffering.

    Jordan Peterson

  • It makes sense that a witch lives in a swamp.

    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

  • You should do what other people do, unless you have a very good reason not to.

    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

  • 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 go backward in life.

    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

  • Don’t compare yourself with other people; compare yourself with who you were yesterday.

    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

  • It is more difficult to rule yourself than to rule a city.

    Jordan Peterson

  • Assuming if there’s such a thing as reality, if you have a false relationship with it, how can you do anything but fail?

    Jordan Peterson

  • If you don’t stand your ground, then all that happens is people push you backwards.

    Jordan Peterson

  • If you’re a social scientist worth your salt, you never do a univariate analysis.

    Jordan Peterson

  • To master a new technology, you have to play with it.

    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

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

    Jordan Peterson

  • It’s not just human nature to associate in tribes. It’s deeper than that.

    Jordan Peterson

  • It’s very difficult to regulate yourself, and if you learn to do that, well, it starts to spill over.

    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

  • 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

  • The idea that women were oppressed throughout history is an appalling theory.

    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

  • No one gets away with anything, ever, so take responsibility for your own life.

    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 very hard to find your own words – and you don’t actually exist until you have your own words.

    Jordan Peterson

  • Free speech is not just another value. It’s the foundation of Western civilization.

    Jordan Peterson

  • No one gets away with anything, ever, so take responsibility for your own life.

    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 very hard to find your own words – and you don’t actually exist until you have your own words.

    Jordan Peterson

  • Free speech is not just another value. It’s the foundation of Western civilization.

    Jordan Peterson

  • When you start to realise how much of what you’ve constructed of yourself is based on deception and lies, that is a horrifying realisation.

    Jordan Peterson

  • Music has an intrinsic meaning, which has always been mysterious to me.

    Jordan Peterson

  • Life is tragic. You are tiny and flawed and ignorant and weak, and everything else is huge, complex, and overwhelming.

    Jordan Peterson

  • Power is competence.

    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

  • 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

  • Once someone has spent enough time cultivating bad habits and biding their time, they are much diminished. Much of what they could have been has dissipated.

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

    Jordan Peterson

  • I’m interested in what motivates individuals to participate in atrocious acts to support their ideological identification.

    Jordan Peterson

  • If you learn a martial art, you learn to be dangerous, but simultaneously, you learn to control it.

    Jordan Peterson

  • I’m a practical person. I’m not too bad a carpenter. I can renovate houses.

    Jordan Peterson

  • I could hardly sit through ‘Frozen.’ There was an attempt to craft a moral message and to build the story around that, instead of building the story and letting the moral message emerge. It was the subjugation of art to propaganda, in my estimation.

    Jordan Peterson

  • 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.

    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

  • Abortion is clearly wrong.

    Jordan Peterson

  • I have something in common with Nazis in that I am opposed to the radical Left. And when you oppose the radical Left, you end up being a part of a much larger group that includes Nazis in it.

    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

  • 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

  • Happiness’ is a pointless goal.

    Jordan Peterson

  • The truth is something that burns. It burns off dead wood. And people don’t like having the dead wood burnt off, often because they’re 95 percent dead wood.

    Jordan Peterson

  • Don’t lie about anything, ever. Lying leads to Hell.

    Jordan Peterson

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

    Jordan Peterson

  • The book, ’12 Rules For Life,’ is a very serious book. There’s elements of humor in it, but I’m trying to struggle with things at the deepest possible level and to explain to people why it’s necessary to live a upstanding and noble and moral and truthful and responsible life, and why there’s hell to pay if you don’t do that.

    Jordan Peterson

  • I suppose for a very long time I’ve been trying to understand how it is that people might make sense out of their lives and make meaning and make their lives meaningful in the face of the trouble that life brings.

    Jordan Peterson

  • I like to recede away from classifications. You might say that indicates a fundamental lack of commitment. I suppose that’s true to some degree.

    Jordan Peterson

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

    Jordan Peterson

  • In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion-, and even nation-centred cultures.

    Jordan Peterson

  • My publication record puts me in the top 0.5 percent of psychologists.

    Jordan Peterson

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

    Jordan Peterson

  • The book, ’12 Rules For Life,’ is a very serious book. There’s elements of humor in it, but I’m trying to struggle with things at the deepest possible level and to explain to people why it’s necessary to live a upstanding and noble and moral and truthful and responsible life, and why there’s hell to pay if you don’t do that.

    Jordan Peterson

  • I suppose for a very long time I’ve been trying to understand how it is that people might make sense out of their lives and make meaning and make their lives meaningful in the face of the trouble that life brings.

    Jordan Peterson

  • I like to recede away from classifications. You might say that indicates a fundamental lack of commitment. I suppose that’s true to some degree.

    Jordan Peterson

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

    Jordan Peterson

  • In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion-, and even nation-centred cultures.

    Jordan Peterson

  • My publication record puts me in the top 0.5 percent of psychologists.

    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

  • 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

  • I think Canadians are more interested in international events than Americans because it is such a small country, so politics affect it more.

    Jordan Peterson

  • I’ve done some analysis of the biblical stories as part of my psychological work. I knew that I had more to do, and every time I’ve done it, it’s been extremely valuable. It makes me a better teacher because I have a richer understanding of cultural history.

    Jordan Peterson

  • The literature associating inequality with social instability and poor health outcomes is pretty convincing.

    Jordan Peterson

  • 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.

    Jordan Peterson

  • I do believe that there are places where the mythological and the literal touch.

    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

  • Obviously, I’m no fan of the radical left.

    Jordan Peterson

  • It’s not proper for the government to intrude too thoroughly into the domain of the family. It’s inappropriate.

    Jordan Peterson

  • It isn’t generally the case that liberals dominate entire hierarchies. That isn’t generally how it works, because the hierarchies are usually set up so that conservatives fill up the hierarchies; it’s in the nature of hierarchy.

    Jordan Peterson

  • Kathleen Wynne and her band of radical-left cronies think they have a handle on what constitutes human identity and also what should constitute human morality. And I think that that’s being pushed in a manner in schools that’s completely reprehensible. It’s not education, in my estimation. It’s a form of indoctrination.

    Jordan Peterson

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

    Jordan Peterson

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

    Jordan Peterson

  • 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.

    Jordan Peterson

  • Some of these Ivy League kids want to have it both ways. They want to be baby members of the 1 percent, which they most certainly are, and yet still portray themselves as the oppressed.

    Jordan Peterson

  • I don’t really regard myself as a political figure.

    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.

    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 it’s like the act of snapping the puzzle pieces together.

    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

  • 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 a light in every bit of that narrative. It’s well balanced.

    Jordan Peterson

  • We have to rediscover the eternal values and then live them out.

    Jordan Peterson

  • People have been fed this diet of pabulum, rights, and impulsive freedom. There’s just an absolute starvation for the other side of the story.

    Jordan Peterson

  • I’ve 20,000 hours of clinical practice; you’re not naive after the first few thousand. I’ve helped people deal with things that most people can’t imagine.

    Jordan Peterson

  • All things considered, there’s nobody better for children than parents.

    Jordan Peterson

  • The multiplication force of technology on cognitive differences is massive.

    Jordan Peterson

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