Accept the terrible responsibility of life with eyes wide open.

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

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.

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.'

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

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

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

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.

The connection between psychology, mythology, and literature is as important as the connection between psychology and biology and the hard sciences.

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.

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.

The people who hold that our culture is an oppressive patriarchy, they don't want to admit that the current hierarchy might be predicated on competence.

It's very hard to find your own words - and you don't actually exist until you have your own words.

Don't be dependent. At all. Ever. Period.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Power is competence.

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

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.

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

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

Become aware of your own insufficiency.

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.

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.

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

The masculine spirit is under assault. It's obvious.

It makes sense that a witch lives in a swamp.

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

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

It's a small percentage of people who do the 80-hour-a-week high-powered career thing, and they're almost all men. Why? Well, men are driven by socio-economic status more than women.

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.

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.

'Happiness' is a pointless goal.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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!

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.

You can't go backward in life.