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.

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.

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.

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

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

I like working-class people, generally speaking.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

The most propagandistic element of 'Frozen' was the transformation of the prince at the beginning of the story, who was a perfectly good guy, into a villain with no character development whatsoever about three-quarters of the way to the ending.

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.

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.

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

The multiplication force of technology on cognitive differences is massive.

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.

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.

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

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

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

'Happiness' is a pointless goal.

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

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

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.

Part of the core information that I've been purveying is that identity politics is a sick game. You don't play racial, ethnic, and gender identity games. The Left plays them on behalf of the oppressed, let's say, and the Right tends to play them on behalf of nationalism and ethnic pride. I think they're equally dangerous.

There's no doubt that inequality destabilizes societies. I think the social science evidence on that front is crystal clear.

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.

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.'

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.'

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.

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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.

Abortion is clearly wrong.

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.