Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics And Religion Quotes

Sacredness binds people together, and then blinds them to the arbitrariness of the practice.

Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

If you grow up in a WEIRD society, you become so well educated in the ethic of autonomy that you can detect oppression and inequality even where the apparent victims see nothing wrong.

Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason.

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

Groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies.

Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder. Leon Cass

The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider's job is to serve the elephant.

Creating gods who can see everything, and who hate cheaters and oath breakers, turns out to be a good way to reduce cheating and oath breaking.

With all foreign travel, you learn as much about where you're from as what you're visiting.

Reasoning can take you wherever you want to go.

We live in the tension between neophillia, or attraction to new things, and neophobia, or fear of new things.

Focusing on effective leadership without focusing on a willingness to follow is like studying clapping by studying only the left hand.

The advantage which disciplined soldiers have over undisciplined hordes follows cheaply from the confidence which each man feels in his comrades. Charles Darwin

Cultural change works orders of magnitude faster then genetic change. Stephen Jay Gould

Morality often involves tension within the group motivated by competition between different groups.