Quotes from George Lakoff

Wouldn't it be better if we could fix the potholes in the roads and the bridges that are crumbling? Or, wouldn't we all be better off if everybody with diseases and illnesses could be treated so that diseases and illnesses wouldn't spread? Or, wouldn't it be better if all kids were ready for school when they went to kindergarten?

People do not necessarily vote in their self-interest. They vote their identity. They vote their values. They vote for who they identify with. They may identify with their self-interest. That can happen. It is not that people never care about their self-interest. But they vote their identity. And if their identity fits their self-interest, they will vote for that. It is important to understand that point.

When a company tells its employees that they can no longer afford such "generous benefits" and will have to cut them, it is a framing lie.

Acting on empathy for people who are down and out requires that we have a social safety net to secure their freedom. So progressives see Social Security, welfare, and universal health care as increasing freedom. Conservatives

Therefore, any social or political system in which people get things they don't earn, or are rewarded for lack of self-discipline or for immoral behavior, is simply an immoral system.

An interesting advantage of restitution is that it does not place you in a moral dilemma with respect to the positive-action and debt-payment principles. You both perform a positive action and you pay your debt. A

People who self-identify as "moderates" appear not to be inbetweeners, but rather biconceptuals—conservative in some issue areas and progressive in others. Last

Rewards given to those who have not earned them through competition are thus immoral. They violate the entire system. They remove the incentive to become self-disciplined and they remove the need for obedience to authority. But

For real human beings, the only realism is an embodied realism.

Science is fundamentally a moral enterprise, following the moral imperative to seek the truth.

The mind is inherently embodied. Thought is mostly unconscious. Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.

Metaphor is thus imaginative rationality.

one can be both free and economically secure while leading a totally meaningless and empty existence.

Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.

There is no such thing as a self-made man. Every businessman has used the vast American infrastructure, which the taxpayers paid for, to make his money.

New metaphors are capable of creating new understandings and, therefore, new realities. This should be obvious in the case of poetic metaphor, where language is the medium through which new conceptual metaphors are created.

You can't understand Twenty-first-Century Politics with an Eighteenth-Century Brain.

We categorize as we do because we have the brains and bodies we have and because we interact in the world as we do.

Metaphysics in philosophy is, of course, supposed to characterize what is real - literally real. The irony is that such a conception of the real depends upon unconscious metaphors.

Aristotle, on the other hand, saw poetry as having a positive value: "It is a great thing, indeed, to make proper use of the poetic forms, . . . But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor" (Poetics 1459a); "ordinary words convey only what we know already; it is from metaphor that we can best get hold of something fresh" (Rhetoric 1410b).

People do not necessarily vote in their self-interest. They vote their identity. They vote their values. They vote for who they identify with.

Fourth, the system of conceptual metaphors is not arbitrary or just historically contingent; rather, it is shaped to a significant extent by the common nature of our bodies and the shared ways that we all function in the everyday world.

Patriotism is about improving the lives of one's fellow citizens and improving one's country's contribution to the world. In the conservative moral hierarchy, our country is taken as simply better than other countries. This is jingoism, not true patriotism, which rests on progressive values.

Any truth must be in a humanly conceptualized and understandable form if it is to be a truth for us. If it's not a truth for us, how can we make sense of its being a truth at all?