Quotes from George Lakoff

Since the 1970s, the concept of taxation has shifted from the source of needed, and often revered, public resources to the idea that taxation is a burden—an affliction in need of "tax relief.

The consequence is that arguing simply in terms of facts—how many people have no health insurance, how many degrees Earth has warmed in the last decade, how long it's been since the last raise in the minimum wage—will likely fall on deaf ears. That's not to say the facts aren't important. They are extremely important.

Remember that there is no ideology of the moderate—no set of views held by all moderates.

Connect the private-depends-on-the-public concept to something that conservatives will understand: freedom.

Progressive and conservative worldviews contradict each other. Both are characterized in the brain via neural circuitry.

Public resources allow for freedom in case after case, opening up all kinds of opportunities in life. It is the freedom that public resources afford that make them central to democracy. Saying it right—and saying it over and over—is advice that can be applied to issue after issue.

The Strict Father model takes as background the view that life is difficult and that the world is fundamentally dangerous.

As I describe in my book Whose Freedom?, progressives and conservatives have very different views of freedom. Conservatives talk about their version of freedom, which does not include either equality or the role of government in securing it.

Neuroscientists have discovered a brain overlap, too, between imagining and doing. Many of the same neural regions are activated when we form mental images as when we actually see.

At issue is what freedom is supposed to mean, what democracy is supposed to mean, and what personhood is supposed to be.

What we have here is an image-mapping based on structure—in this case, struc- ture that is in part metaphorically imposed. When such a mapping exists between the structure of a sentence and the structure of the meaning or the image that the sentence conveys, the mapping is called "iconic.

Affirmative action is about fairness, for redressing widespread unfairness. Conservatives

Incidentally, charity for the "deserving" few costs a lot less than taxes to provide resources for the benefit of all.

Iconicity provides an extra layer of metaphorical structure to the poem.

the lawsuits weren't frivolous," you talk instead about public protection, about open courts, about the right to have juries decide, and about the last line of defense against unscrupulous or negligent corporations

There is a meta- phoric understanding of the workings of imagination that is based on motion, via the metaphor that THE MIND IS A BODY MOVING IN SPACE, and the related metaphor that KNOWING IS SEEING.

75 percent of charter schools have results that are worse than, or no different from, traditional public schools.

Moreover, charter schools have no accountability to local school districts or the public. A consequence in Texas, for example, is that charter schools tend to debunk evolution and science and teach creationism

The conservative attack on public education is being felt drastically in higher education

The moral principles that have priority in each model appear in the other model, but with lesser priorities. Those lesser priorities drastically change the effect of those principles.

Part of the myth is that these model citizens have been given nothing by the government and have made it on their own. The American Dream is that any honest, self-disciplined, hard-working person can do the same.

There is no Cartesian dualistic person, with a mind separate from and independent of the body, sharing exactly the same disembodied transcendent reason with everyone else, and capable of knowing everything about his or her mind simply by self-reflection. Rather, the mind is inherently embodied, reason is shaped by the body, and since most thought is unconscious, the mind cannot be known simply by self-reflection. Empirical study is necessary.

In a large range of cases, the failure of students to learn has mainly to do with a national economic failure and not with inadequate teachers or schools.

Progressive values are the best of traditional American values. Stand up for your values with dignity and strength. You are a true patriot because of your values.