by: Jordan B. Peterson read in 2018

xxvii "...I had come to believe that the constituent elements of the world as drama were order and chaos, and not material things.
xxix Look for JPB's "Big Ideas" on YouTube (4 lectures)
xxxi "Heidegger tried to distinguish between reality, as conceived objectively, and the totality of human experience (which is his "Being"). Being (with a capital "B") is what each of us experiences, subjectively, personally and individually, as well as what we each experience jointly with others"
8 Price's Law; Pareto Distribution
14 "If Mother Nature wasn't so hell-bent on our destruction, it would be easier for us to exist in simple harmony with her dictates."
23 "When skillfully integrated, the ability to respond with aggression and violence decreases rather than increases the probability that actual aggression will become necessary." TR, Reagan, and Trump's policies
35 Consciousness is the process that mediates between order and chaos.
40 "Our minds are far older than mere humanity." Even more than JBP thinks, I suspect. I think it even predates the Big Bang by many orders of magnitude.
41 "Women's proclivity to say no, more than any other force, has shaped our evolution into the creative, industrious, upright, large-brained (competitive, aggressive, domineering) creatures that we are."
42 "We already know all this, but we don't know we know it." Who's we??
47 "Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn insisted, the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being."
54 "Only man will inflict suffering for the sake of suffering. That is the best definition of evil I have been able to formulate. Animals can't manage that, but humans, with their excruciating, semi-divine capacities, most certainly can. And with this realization we have well-nigh full legitimization of the idea, very unpopular in modern intellectual circles, of Original Sin."
56 The hard problem of cosmic significance: Does free choice matter?
60 "We have the semi-divine capacity for consciousness. Our consciousness participates in the speaking forth of being. We are low-resolution ("kenotic") versions of God. We can make order from chaos—and vice versa—in our way, with our words. So, we may not exactly be God, but we're not exactly nothing, either." Fits with my TDB/SG Theory.
62 "Hatred for self and mankind must be balanced with gratefulness for tradition and the state and astonishment at what normal, everyday people accomplish—to say nothing of the staggering achievements of the truly remarkable."
76 "...not everyone who is failing is a victim, and not everyone at the bottom wishes to rise, although many do, and many manage it. Nonetheless, people will often accept or even amplify their own suffering, as well as that of others, if they can brandish it as evidence of the world's injustice."
91 "...an evil triad: arrogance, deceit, and resentment. Nothing causes more harm than this underworld Trinity. But resentment always means one of two things. Either the resentful person is immature, in which case he or she should shut up, quit whining, and get on with it, or there is tyranny afoot—in which case the person subjugated has a moral obligation to speak up."
103 "You can only find out what you actually believe (rather than what you think you believe) by watching how you act. You simply don't know what you believe, before that. You are too complex to understand yourself."
104 "The Bible is, for better or worse, the foundational document of Western civilization (of Western values, Western morality, and Western conceptions of good and evil). It's the product of processes that remain fundamentally beyond our comprehension. The Bible is a library composed of many books, each written and edited by many people. It's a truly emergent document—a selected, sequenced and finally coherent story written by no one and everyone over many thousands of years. The Bible has been thrown up, out of the deep, by the collective human imagination, which is itself a product of unimaginable forces operating over unfathomable spans of time. Its careful, respectful study can reveal things to us about what we believe and how we do and should act that can be discovered in almost no other manner." I think it is time to have a crack at imagining those "unimaginable forces" and those "unfathomable spans of time". For starters, I suggest going beyond the artificial boundaries of space and time dogmatically dictated by Kant and modern science; we need to consider the possibilities of the real existence of extra dimensions of both space and time.
111 "To journey happily may well be better than to arrive successfully."
134 "Accepting an objection as formulated is halfway to accepting its validity, and that can be dangerous if the question is ill-posed."
135 "If a child has not been taught to behave properly by the age of four, it will forever be difficult for him or her to make friends. The research literature is quite clear on this."
177 "Life is indeed "nasty, brutish and short," as the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes so memorably remarked. But man's capacity for evil makes it worse. This means that the central problem of life—the dealing with its brute facts—is not merely what and how to sacrifice to diminish suffering, but what and how to sacrifice to diminish suffering and evil—the conscious and voluntary and vengeful source of the worst suffering."
178 "The problem of evil remained unsolved even by the divinely acceptable sacrifices of Abel. It took thousands of additional years for humanity to come up with anything else resembling a solution. The same issue emerges again, in its culminating form, the story of Christ and his temptation by Satan. But this time it's expressed more comprehensively—and the hero wins."
184 "There's something above even the pinnacle of the highest of dominance hierarchies, access to which should not be sacrificed for mere proximal success. It's a real place, too, although not to be conceptualized in the standard geographical sense of place we typically use to orient ourselves. I had a vision, once, of an immense landscape..." Large, extra spatial dimensions are exactly like that. We should consider them.
188 "Nietzsche claimed, first, that it was precisely the sense of truth developed in the highest sense by Christianity itself that ultimately came to question and then to undermine the fundamental presuppositions of the faith. That was partly because the difference between moral or narrative truth and objective truth had not yet been fully comprehended (and so an opposition was presumed where none necessarily exists)—but that does not bely the point. Even when the modern atheists opposed to Christianity belittle fundamentalists for insisting, for example, that the creation account in Genesis is objectively true, they are using their sense of truth, highly developed over the centuries of Christian culture, to engage in such argumentation."
188 ""God is dead," said Nietzsche. "God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us?"" I say that this is too extreme. We have not killed Him but only wounded Him, and rightly so. We only need to recognize the limitations of God and all mysteries are cleared up. God is not perfect but is still unimaginably powerful and complex.
192 "For Nietzsche and Dostoevsky alike, freedom—even the ability to act—requires constraint. For this reason, they both recognized the vital necessity of the dogma of the church. The individual must be constrained, moulded—even brought close to destruction—by a restrictive, coherent disciplinary structure, before he or she can act freely and competently. Dostoevsky, with his great generosity of spirit, granted to the church, corrupt as it might be, a certain element of mercy, a certain pragmatism. He admitted that the spirit of Christ, the world-engendering Logos, had historically and might still find its resting place—even its sovereignty—within that dogmatic structure.

If a father disciplines his son properly, he obviously interferes with his freedom, particularly in the here-and-now. He put limits on the voluntary expression of his son's Being. forcing him to take his place as a socialized member of the world. Such a father requires that all that childish potential be funneled down a singly [sic] pathway. In placing such limitations on his son, he might be considered a destructive force, acting as he does to replace the miraculous plurality of childhood with a single narrow actuality. but if the father does not take such action, he merely lets his son reman Peter Pan, the eternal Boy, King of the Lost Boys, Ruler of the non-existent Neverland. That is not a morally acceptable alternative."
195 "An idea is a personality, not a fact."
195 "...the future can be made better if the proper sacrifices take place in the present. No other animal has ever figured this out, and it took us untold hundreds of thousands of years to do it. It took further eons of observation and hero-worship, and then millennia of study, to distill that idea into a story. It then took additional vast stretches of time to assess that story, to incorporate it, so that we now can simply say, "If you are disciplined and privilege the future over the present you can change the structure of reality in your favor."
199 "Meaning emerges from the interplay between the possibilities of the world and the value structure operating within that world."
216 "The tragedy of Being is the consequence of our limitations and the vulnerability defining human experience. It may even be the price we pay for Being itself—since existence must be limited, to be at all." Most true!
217 "...rationality is subject to the single worst temptation—to raise what it knows now to the status of an absolute.
218 Reason as a personality: Milton's Lucifer.
218 "...it is the greatest temptation of the rational faculty to glorify its own capacity and its own productions and to claim that in the face of its theories nothing transcendent or outside its domain need exist. This means that all important facts have been discovered. This means that nothing important remains unknown. But most importantly, it means denial of the necessity for courageous individual confrontation with Being."
218 "The totalitarian denies the necessity for the individual to take ultimate responsibility for Being."
222 The story of Osiris, Set, and Horus fits comfortably and meaningfully within the framework of TDB Theory.
223 "Nietzsche said that a man's worth was determined by how much truth he could tolerate."
223 "The Word that produces order from Chaos sacrifices everything, even itself, to God. That single sentence, wise beyond comprehension, sums up Christianity."
225 "...there are no atheists. There are only people who know, and don't know, what God they serve."
227 "The equivalence of life and limitation is the primary and unavoidable fact of existence." I think this is even more profound than JBP knows. We should acknowledge that God Himself is limited.
243 "Freud had a point. He was, after all, a genius. You can tell that because people still hate him."
263 "...without the extension of self into machine, it would be impossible to drive."
279 "The psyche (the soul) and the world are both organized, at the highest levels of human existence, with language, through communication."
296 Excellent summary of the human condition.
302 "Every word we speak is a gift from our ancestors. Every thought we think was thought previously by someone smarter."
303 "We experience almost all the emotions that make life deep and engaging as a consequence of moving successfully towards something deeply desired and valued. The price we pay for that involvement is the inevitable creation of hierarchies of success, while the inevitable consequence is difference in outcome. Absolute equality would therefore require the sacrifice of value itself—and then there would be nothing worth living for."
310 Derrida
311 "...the fact that power plays a role in human motivation does not mean that it plays the only role, or even the primary role."
313 "If radical right-wingers were receiving state funding for political operations disguised as university courses, as the radical left-wingers clearly are, the uproar from progressives across North America would be deafening."
375 "...the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts."" - Solzhenitsyn