George Lakoff Quotes

The mind is inherently embodied. Thought is mostly unconscious. Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.

Unless you frame yourself, others will frame you — the media, your enemies, your competitors, your well-meaning friends.

Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities.

The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.

The Public provides freedom...Individualism begins after the roads are built, after individualists have had an education, after medical research has cured their diseases.

Most conservatives are conservatives because they think they are morally correct.

If we are to know ourselves, philosophy needs to maintain an ongoing dialogue with the sciences of mind.

You can't understand Twenty-first-Century Politics with an Eighteenth-Century Brain.

For real human beings, the only realism is an embodied realism.

One of the reasons that politics lets us down is that we keep comparing it to our ideal narratives, to politics on TV or in the movies, which is tidier and better fits such structures.

We categorize as we do because we have the brains and bodies we have and because we interact in the world as we do.

Science is fundamentally a moral enterprise, following the moral imperative to seek the truth.

We know that someone who has channeled his anger into something constructive has not had a cow. How do we know these things?

In short, philosophical theories are largely the product of the hidden hand of the cognitive unconscious.

Metaphysics in philosophy is, of course, supposed to characterize what is real - literally real. The irony is that such a conception of the real depends upon unconscious metaphors.