Righteous Mind By Jonathan Haidt Quotes & Sayings

The Chinese sage Mencius made the analogy between morality and food 2,300 years ago when he wrote that "moral principles please our minds as beef and mutton and pork please our mouths."4 In this chapter and the next two, I'll develop the analogy that the righteous mind is like a tongue with six taste receptors. In this analogy, morality is like cuisine: it's a cultural construction, influenced by accidents of environment and history, but it's not so flexible that anything goes. You can't have a cuisine based on tree bark, nor can you have one based primarily on bitter tastes. Cuisines vary, but they all must please tongues equipped with the same five taste receptors.5 Moral matrices vary, but they all must please righteous minds equipped with the same six social receptors. — Jonathan Haidt

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

The more you summarize, the more order you put in, the less randomness. Hence the same condition that makes us simplify pushes us to think that the world is less random than it actually is. And — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

BORN TO BE RIGHTEOUS I could have titled this book The Moral Mind to convey the sense that the human mind is designed to "do" morality, just as it's designed to do language, sexuality, music, and many other things described in popular books reporting the latest scientific findings. But I chose the title The Righteous Mind to convey the sense that human nature is not just intrinsically moral, it's also intrinsically moralistic, critical, and judgmental. — Jonathan Haidt

Strange how we decorate pain.
These ribbons, for instance,
and the small hard teardrops of blood.
Who are they for?
Do we think the dead care? — Margaret Atwood

But life doesn't give us the option to remake our decisions, only the power to reconceive them — Tiffany Baker

And every single thing you ever did that bothered me, is every single thing I miss. — Pleasefindthis

Love well, be loved and do something of value. — Aristotle.

If all people learned to think in the non Aristotelian manner of quantum mechanics, the world would change so radically that most of what we call "stupidity" and even a great deal of what we consider "insanity" might disappear, and the "intractable" problems of war, poverty and injustice would suddenly seem a great deal closer to solution. — Alfred Korzybski

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. — Jonathan Haidt

Imagine the consequences if Saddam fails to comply and we fail to act. Saddam will be emboldened, believing the international community has lost its will. He will rebuild his arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. And some day, some way, I am certain, he will use that arsenal again, as he has ten times since 1983. — Sandy Berger

I'm very old-fashioned. I believe that people should stay married for life, like pigeons and Catholics. — Woody Allen

The real badge of honour at work is not to work longer than anyone else, but to work smarter than anyone else. — David Hieatt

My dad was Chinese-American and very conservative when it came to his family's futures. He said if I wanted to have a secure job, I should go into science. So I did what Dad said and went to medical school, but the writing bug never left me. — Tess Gerritsen