Quotes from George Lakoff

In the United States, in 1976 the top 1 percent had 19.9 percent of the wealth. In 2010, the top 1 percent had 35.4 percent of the wealth. In 2010, the top 5 percent had 63 percent of the wealth; and the top 20 percent had 88.9 percent of the wealth. That left the bottom 80 percent with 11.1 percent of the wealth.

As the share of the nation's wealth going to the wealthy rises, the share going to everyone else falls. What else falls? The freedom that wealth can buy, the quality of life that wealth can buy, the power that wealth can buy, and the electoral influence that wealth can buy. Technically, we may still have one person, one vote. But the effect of one person on elections has gone way down.

Can linguistic framing change the kind of person someone is? The answer seems to be yes, though possibly not in extreme cases.

But the facts have to be framed in appropriately moral terms so that they can be taken seriously.

While it is not impossible to have a Nurturant Parent rationalist morality (perhaps certain versions of utilitarianism are of this sort), Reason is not typically understood as a nurturer. Reason commands, lays down the law, gives orders, judges, reprimands, and so on. We almost never conceive of it as nurturing, feeling, caring, and so forth.

Consider for a moment who is most likely to want an abortion. There are two classical kinds of cases: Unmarried teenage girls who have been having sex but have been careless or ignorant in the matter of birth control; women who want careers or independent lives and whose deepest aspirations would be destroyed by having a child at this point in their lives.

The private depends on the public. Public resources make private life possible.

Liberal Christianity is very, very different. Liberal Christianity sees God as essentially beneficent, as wanting to help people. The central idea in liberal Christianity is grace, where grace is understood as a kind of metaphorical nurturance. In liberal Christianity, you can't earn grace—you are given grace unconditionally by God.

A primary function of the Strict Father model is the protection of innocent children. Opposition to abortion provides an ideal opportunity to assert a protective function and justify Strict Father morality.

But for conservatives, the very idea that the private depends on the public is anathema—immoral.

In Nurturant Parent morality, the teenage girl is "in trouble," she needs help and deserves empathy (moral-action Category 2—helping).

The other conservative use of reflexivity depends upon getting those votes. Once in office, conservatives can not only say that government cannot work and has to be minimized and privatized, but by being in the government, they can also stop it from working, thus creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. How? By cutting taxes, by cutting funding, by passing laws, and, in the Supreme Court, by reinterpreting laws.

The honest strategy is to use only your language and avoid using the other side's language. That will maximally activate your moral system in the moderates on the other side.

In contemporary America, politics and personhood are inseparable—and apparently moving in a conservative direction.

The fundamental frames through which you understand the world are physical.

It is vital that progressives understand why just citing the facts doesn't work, and why attention to public discourse must be constant, not just focused on elections.

When the United States was founded, politics and personhood had come together, but in the progressive direction. Historian Lynn Hunt at UCLA goes through the history in detail in her book Inventing Human Rights: A History.

You can only make sense of what your brain allows.

Conservative language activates circuitry for the conservative worldview; progressive language activates circuitry for the progressive worldview.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Julie

Because of the effect of language and imagery on the brain, the constant use of one ideology's language over the other's has an enormous effect on our politics.

It is a fact that the private depends on the public—perhaps the most central fact of American democracy—and yet strict conservatives either can't see it or see it as a form of immorality so fundamental that it must be defeated at all costs.

The central conservative strategy to minimize, or even eliminate, public resources has been to eliminate the money that funds public resources—taxes!

Much of the academic world and academic institutions are run according to this metaphor, which is based on Strict Father morality. Intellectuals who accept this view of the academic world may be political liberals, but they are intimately acquainted with Strict Father morality and practice it in their everyday professional lives. Feminisms