Sports is to war as pornography is to sex.

— Jonathan Haidt

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

— Jonathan Haidt

The author found participants in a study able to come up with more reasons to support their position but not any more likely to change their minds based on contradictory evidence. In effect, they enlist their IQ on behalf of their instincts.

— Jonathan Haidt

The emotion of disgust evolved initially to optimize responses to the omnivore's dilemma. Individuals who had a properly calibrated sense of disgust were able to consume more calories than their overly disgustable cousins while consuming fewer dangerous microbes than their insufficiently disgustable cousins.

— Jonathan Haidt

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

— Jonathan Haidt

The most powerful force ever known on this planet is human cooperation — a force for construction and destruction.

— Jonathan Haidt

The philosopher Edmund Spinoffs has argued that consequentialists and deontologist worked together to convince Westerners in the twentieth century that morality is the study of moral quandaries and dilemmas. Where the Greeks focused on the character of a person and asked what kind of person we should each aim to become, modern ethics focuses on actions, asking when a particular action is right or wrong. ... This turn from character ethics to quandary ethics has turned moral education away from virtues and toward moral reasoning. If morality is about dilemmas, then moral education is training in problem-solving.

— Jonathan Haidt

The president is the high priest of what sociologist Robert Bella calls the 'American civil religion.' The president must invoke the name of God (though not Jesus), glorify America's heroes and history, quote its sacred texts (the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution), and perform the transubstantiation of paribus UNAM.

— Jonathan Haidt

The rider evolved to serve to the elephant.

— Jonathan Haidt

The strong version of the adversity hypothesis might be true, but only if we add caveats: For adversity to be maximally beneficial, it should happen at the right time (young adulthood), to the right people (those with the social and psychological resources to rise to challenges and find benefits), and to the right degree (not so severe as to cause PTSD).

— Jonathan Haidt