Quotes by George Lakoff

George Lakoff

Barack Obama understands what Ronald Reagan learned, which is that people vote not on the basis of issues and policy details, but on the basis of something deeper, namely, what are your values? Are you authentic? Do you say what you believe? Do you communicate with us? And do we identify with you? You don’t know what particular issues are going to come up in the future, so you have to depend on someone’s values, and whether they are telling you the truth, and whether you can trust them in office. Obama’s been running a campaign on that basis.

Believe

People

Running

Conservatives say human beings are people who are primarily concerned with self-interest, and that’s what they should be concerned with – self-interest and individual responsibility. They shouldn’t be paying for anybody else’s health care or anything else like that. As a result, government is something that should be absolutely minimal. It’s not there for your overall protection and empowerment – it’s not there to offer protection against disease or natural disasters or bad products or companies who sell you fallacious mortgages and so on.

Empowerment

People

Responsibility

Do we really think that the United States will have the protection of innocent Afghans in mind if it rains terror down on the Afghan infrastructure? We are supposedly fighting them because they immorally killed innocent civilians. That made them evil. If we do the same, are we any less immoral?

Fighting

Rain

Thinking

Empathy – that is, caring about people and acting responsibly on that care, not just for yourself, but for others – this is something that Barack Obama understands very well. He was a professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago for ten years. As an expert on the Constitution and on our family values, he understands very well that the country is fundamentally about caring for one another. The day after his speech, he was interviewed on CNN, and Anderson Cooper asked him what patriotism was. He said patriotism begins with caring for one another.

Caring

Country

People

For centuries, we in the West have thought of ourselves as rational animals whose mental capacities transcend our bodily nature. In this traditional view our minds are abstract, logical, unemotionally rational, consciously accessible, and, above all, able to directly fit and represent the world. Language has a special place in thie view of what a human is – it is a privileged, logical symbol system internal to our minds that transparently expresses abstract concepts that are defined in terms of the external world itself.

Animal

Mind

Views

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

Medicine

Philosophy

Real

Holding onto and manipulating physical objects is one of the things we learn earliest and do the most. It should not be surprising that object control is the basis of one of the five most fundamental metaphors for our inner life. To control objects, we must learn to control our bodies. We learn both forms of control together. Self-control and object control are inseparable experiences from earliest childhood. It is no surprise that we should have as a metaphor-a primary metaphor-Self Control is Object Control.

Philosophy

Self

Should Have

If we are to know ourselves, philosophy needs to maintain an ongoing dialogue with the sciences of mind.

Mind

Needs

Philosophy

If you’re a progressive, you can find lots of people who call themselves conservatives, but who agree with you on lots of things. There are people who call themselves conservatives, but who love the land as much as any environmentalist. Progressives share a number of common values with people who call themselves conservatives. Barack Obama has understood that very well. What he calls bipartisanship is not adopting conservative views, but finding where people who consider themselves conservatives share with him and other progressives these fundamental American values.

Common

Conservative

People

In all aspects of life… we define our reality in terms of metaphors and then proceed to act on the basis of the metaphors. We draw inferences, set goals, make commitments, and execute plans, all on the basis of how we in part structure our experience, consciously and unconsciously, by means of metaphor.

Commitment

Mean

Reality

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Monday Morning

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Quotes by George Lakoff

George Lakoff

Do we really think that the United States will have the protection of innocent Afghans in mind if it rains terror down on the Afghan infrastructure? We are supposedly fighting them because they immorally killed innocent civilians. That made them evil. If we do the same, are we any less immoral?

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

If we are to know ourselves, philosophy needs to maintain an ongoing dialogue with the sciences of mind.

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The Future Blueprint

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