Jonathan Haidt ist assoziierter Professor für Positive Psychologie an der Universität von Virginia. 2001 hat er den Templeton Preis für Positive Psychologie bekommen, 2004 wurde er mit dem Virginia “Outstanding Faculty Award” ausgezeichnet.
Der Autor des Buchs The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom
(Die Glückshypothese: Zeitgemäße Wahrheit angesichts althergebrachter Weisheit)
ist ein weltlich gesinnter Atheist, der altem Wissen großen Respekt entgegen bringt.

• Jonathan Haidt, Sozial- und Kulturpsychologe, Morality: 2012, Konferenz des New Yorker, Gastgeber Henry Finder, Diskussion über die Fünf Säulen der Moral, Video (engl.) Newyorker.com, 7. Mai 2007
  Haidt: It doesn't matter who is in the White House. Conservative, religious people are happier. Conservatives participate in denser, more binding structures.

• Peace, in the sense of the absence of war, is of little value to someone who is dying of hunger or cold. It will not remove the pain of torture inflicted on a prisoner of conscience. It does not comfort those who have lost their loved ones in floods caused by senseless deforestation in a neighboring country. Peace can only last where human rights are respected, where people are fed, and where individuals and nations are free. The XIVth Dalai Lama
• Democracy is not a spectator sport. Brian Bergquist
• Civil disobedience: Passive (i.e. nonviolent) resistance to state power, usually involving mass defiance of unpopular laws or passive noncooperation with the authorities. Such methods can cause considerable difficulties for the state, which may be reluctant to use force against nonviolent protestors for fear of inflaming the situation or alienating world opinion. Civil disobedience was first developed as a concerted strategy by Gandhi, who pioneered his techniques of satyagraha first in South Africa and then in British India. Similar methods were subsequently adopted by supporters of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the 1950s, by Martin Luther King Jr. and the US civil rights movement of the 1960s, and by large crowds demanding reform in Czechoslovakia and other countries in the weeks before the collapse of communism in 1989. History suggests that such techniques are most likely to succeed when the regime is relatively liberal, when its authority is already crumbling, or when peaceful protests are backed by the implicit threat of mass violence should their demands not be met. The Macmillan Encyclopedia, 2001
• The greater the institution, the greater the chances of abuse. Democracy is a great institution and therefore it is liable to be greatly abused. The remedy therefore is not avoidance of democracy, but reduction of the possibility of abuse, to a minimum. Mahatma Gandhi
• When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall, always. Mahatma Gandhi
• A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history. Mahatma Gandhi (See also Margaret Mead)
• Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has. Margaret Mead, US-American cultural anthropologist (1901-1978)
• Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history. George Bernard Shaw
• They tell us that we live in a great free republic; that our institutions are democratic; that we are a free and self-governing people. That is too much, even for a joke. [...] Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder [...] And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. Eugene Victor Debs, US American Union leader
• The whole course of human history may depend on a change of heart in one solitary and even humble individual – for it is in the solitary mind and soul of the individual that the battle between good and evil is waged and ultimately won or lost. M. Scott Peck, People of the Lie
• (He) who wins by injustice may dominate the present day, but history will always judge him to be a shameful loser. Kim Dae-jung
• It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a person stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. Robert Kennedy
• Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. George Santayana, Spanish philosopher, The Life of Reason, 1905
• A democracy cannot survive as a permanent form of government. It can last only until its citizens discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority (who vote) will vote for those candidates promising the greatest benefits from the public purse, with the result that a democracy will always collapse from loose fiscal policies, always followed by a dictatorship. Lord Thomas MacCauley, letter to an American friend, May 23, 1857

Evolutionary cycle of democratic nations

• From bondage to spiritual faith.
• From faith to great courage.
• From courage to liberty.
• From liberty to abundance.
• From abundance to complacency.
• From complacency to selfishness.
• From selfishness to apathy.
• From apathy to dependency.
• And from dependency back again into bondage.
  Lord Thomas MacCauley, letter to an American friend, May 23, 1857

• If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. Dr. Joseph Goebbels
• Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim. George Santayana, Spanish philosopher
• At long intervals in human history it may occasionally happen that the practical politician and the political philosopher are one. The more intimate the union, the greater his political difficulties. Such a man does not labor to satisfy the demands that are obvious to every philistine; he reaches out toward ends that are comprehensible only to the few. Therefore his life is torn between hatred and love. The protest of the present generation, which does not understand him, wrestles with the recognition of posterity, for whom he also works. Adolf Hitler, written in the Landsberg prison, Bavaria, 1924
• Democracy don't rule the world, You'd better get that in your head; This world is ruled by violence, But I guess that's better left unsaid. Bob Dylan, lyrics