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

• [...] until political power and philosophy entirely coincide, [...] cities will have no rest from evils, [...] nor, I think, will the human race. Plato, Republic 473c-d

Democracy

• Democracy is not a spectator sport. Brian Bergquist

• A democratic civilisation will save itself only if it makes the language of image into a stimulus for critical reflection, not an invitation to hypnosis. Umberto Eco

• Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve. George Bernard Shaw

• Government of the people and by the people sets a single standard for all who hold power: you must maintain your power through consent, not coercion; you must respect the rights of minorities, and participate with a spirit of tolerance and compromise; you must place the interests of your people and the legitimate workings of the political process above your party. Without these ingredients, elections alone do not make true democracy. Barack Obama, 44th US president, President Obama Addresses Muslim World in Cairo, Washington Post, Thursday, 4. June 2009

• In my country we don't have democrats and republicans. We have remocrats and depublicans. Video lecture by Watts Wacker, US American futurist, Watts Wacker – World Renowned Futurist, YouTube film, presented by speakersspotlight, 7:16 minutes duration, posted 29. August 2009

Fascism

• Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power. Benito Mussolini

• 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

• Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action. George Washington, speech dated 7. January 1790, published in the Boston Independent Chronicle, 14. January 1790

• 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

• The spirit of democracy is not a mechanical thing to be adjusted by abolition of forms. It requires change of heart. 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 (1901-1978) US-American cultural anthropologist

• 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

• Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president. Theodore Roosevelt

• Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. George Santayana, Spanish philosopher, The Life of Reason, 1905

• The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed – and hence clamorous to be led to safety – by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) US American journalist, essayist

• People deserve the government they get. Henry Ford

• So let us begin anew – remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.
  Let both sides explore what problems unite us instead of belaboring those problems which divide us. John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) 35th President of USA, inaugural, 1961

• Paradoxically enough, the release of initiative and enterprise made possible by popular self-government ultimately generates disintegrating forces from within. Again and again after freedom has brought opportunity and some degree of plenty, the competent become selfish, luxury-loving and complacent, the incompetent and the unfortunate grow envious and covetous, and all three groups turn aside from the hard road of freedom to worship the Golden Calf of economic security.
  Henning Webb Prentis, Jr., President of the Armstrong Cork Company, speech entitled Industrial Management in a Republic, Waldorf Astoria, New York, 250th meeting of the National Conference Board, 18. March 1943

• 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, 23. May 1857

• The government is best which governs least. Thomas Jefferson

• When the government fears the people there is liberty; when the people fear the government there is tyranny. Thomas Jefferson

• A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both. Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969) 34th US President, Inaugural Address, 1953

• Rankism is universal. It [...] is defined as abuse of the power inherent in rank, and it is human nature to abuse power – so long as we can get away with it. [...] Racism and the other isms are types of predation, [...] not written in our genes. [...] Rankism’s victims are likely to turn into perpetrators as soon as they can get away with it – to even the score, so to speak. This is why rooting out rankism is difficult.
  We learn; we evolve; we change. We will overcome rankism […] because dignitarian workplaces, schools, and societies are more productive and creative, more powerful and successful than are rankist workplaces, schools, and societies. Interview with Robert Fuller, Ph.D., a professor in physics, a college president, dignity and rankism researcher, Dignity's Apostle, presented by Intrepid Liberal Journal, blogspot by Robert Ellmann, Saturday, 20. May 2006

• No nation has yet built a dignitarian society. Doing so is democracy’s next step. Some Scandinavian societies seem to be moving in that direction. The bottom line of a dignitarian society is that everyone’s dignity is afforded equal protection. People can still hold unequal ranks, but in those ranks, dignity is equal from top to bottom. At a minimum, this means that regardless of rank, everyone is paid a living wage, has access to good health care and education. […] Even prisoners are treated with dignity, as they serve their terms. It is very hard for people who have grown up with libertarian values to get this distinction, but getting it is the next step for democracy. […] The guarantee in a dignitarian society is to dignity, not to a particular role or rank. Interview with Robert Fuller, Ph.D., a professor in physics, a college president, dignity and rankism researcher, Dignity's Apostle, presented by Intrepid Liberal Journal, blogspot by Robert Ellmann, Saturday, 20. May 2006

• 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

• Never before has a populist democracy [U.S.A.] attained international supremacy. But the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public's sense of domestic well-being. The economic self-denial (that is, defense spending) and the human sacrifice (casualties, even among professional soldiers) required in the effort are uncongenial to democratic instincts. Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives, pg. 35, Basic Books, 17. September 1998

• Two basic steps are thus required:

1. first, to identify the geostrategically dynamic Eurasian states that have the power to cause a potentially important shift in the international distribution of power and to decipher the central external goals of their respective political elites and the likely consequences of their seeking to attain them; [...]
2. second, to formulate specific U.S. policies to  offset, co-opt, and/or control the above. [...]
   To put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires,

• the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are

1. to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals,
2. to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and
3. to keep the barbarians from coming together. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives, pg. 40, Basic Books, 17. September 1998

• 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

• The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. Albert Einstein

• I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils [capitalism], namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. Albert Einstein, Monthly Review No. 1, Why Socialism, May 1949

• Our best hope, both of a tolerable political harmony and of an inner peace, rests upon our ability to observe the limits of human freedom even while we responsibly exploit its creative possibilities. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Structure of Nations and Empires, 1959

Integral Politics

• But now global systems and integral meshworks are evolving out of corporate states and value communities. These interdependent systems require governance capable of integrating (not dominating) nations and communities over the entire spiral of interior and exterior development. What the world needs now is the first genuinely second-tier [ie, integral, holistic] form of political philosophy and governance. I believe, of course, that it will be an all-quadrant, all-level political theory and practice, deeply integral in its structures and patterns. This will in no way replace the US Constitution (or that of any other nation), but will simply situate it in global meshworks that facilitate mutual unfolding and enhancement – an integral and holonic politics.
  The question remains: exactly how will this be conceived, understood, embraced and practiced? What precise details, what actual specifics, where and how and when? This is the great and exhilirating call of global politics at the millenium. We are awaiting the new global founding Fathers and Mothers who will frame an integral system of governance that will call us to our more encompassing future, that will act as a gentle pacer of transformation for the entire spiral of human development, honoring each and every wave as it unfolds, yet kindly inviting each and all to even greater depth. Ken Wilber, A Theory of Everything, chapter Integral Governance, pg. 90