George Lakoff > Quotes

“Another example of how a metaphor can create new meaning for us came about by accident. An Iranian student, shortly after his arrival in Berkeley, took a seminar on metaphor from one of us. Among the wondrous things that he found in Berkeley was an expression that he heard over and over and understood as a beautifully sane metaphor. The expression was “the solution of my problems”—which he took to be a large volume of liquid, bubbling and smoking, containing all of your problems, either dissolved or in the form of precipitates, with catalysts constantly dissolving some problems (for the time being) and precipitating out others. He was terribly disillusioned to find that the residents of Berkeley had no such chemical metaphor in mind. And well he might be, for the chemical metaphor is both beautiful and insightful. It gives us a view of problems as things that never disappear utterly and that cannot be solved once and for all. All of your problems are always present, only they may be dissolved and in solution, or they may be in solid form. The best you can hope for is to find a catalyst that will make one problem dissolve without making another one precipitate out. [...] The CHEMICAL metaphor gives us a new view of human problems. It is appropriate to the experience of finding that problems which we once thought were “solved” turn up again and again. The CHEMICAL metaphor says that problems are not the kind of things that can be made to disappear forever. To treat them as things that can be “solved” once and for all is pointless. [...] To live by the
CHEMICAL metaphor would mean that your problems have a different kind of reality for you.”
― George Lakoff, Metaphors We Live By

“The mind is inherently embodied.
Thought is mostly unconscious.
Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.”
― George Lakoff, Philosophy In The Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought

“The biology of empathy allows us to comprehend our connection to each other, to other living things, and to the physical world that supports life.”
― George Lakoff, The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain

“Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.”
― George Lakoff, Metaphors We Live By

“one can be both free and economically secure while leading a totally meaningless and empty existence.”
― George Lakoff, Metaphors We Live By

“Metaphor is thus imaginative rationality.”
― George Lakoff, Metaphors We Live By

“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.”
― George Lakoff, The All New Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate

“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.”
― George Lakoff, Metaphors We Live By

“You can't understand Twenty-first-Century Politics with an Eighteenth-Century Brain.”
― George Lakoff, Don't Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate: The Essential Guide for Progressives

“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).”
― George Lakoff, Metaphors We Live By

“We categorize as we do because we have the brains and bodies we have and because we interact in the world as we do.”
― George Lakoff, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought

“The problem with classical disembodied scientific realism is that it takes two intertwined and inseparable dimensions of all experience - the awareness of the experiencing organism and the stable entities and structures it encounters - and erects them as separate and distinct entities called subjects and objects. What disembodied realism ... misses is that, as embodied, imaginative creatures, we never were separated or divorced from reality in the first place. What has always made science possible is our embodiment, not our transcendence of it, and our imagination, not our avoidance of it.”
― George Lakoff, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought

“LABOR IS A RESOURCE and TIME IS A RESOURCE are by no means universal. They emerged naturally in our culture because of the way we view work, our passion for quantification, and our obsession with purposeful ends. These metaphors highlight those aspects of labor and time that are centrally important in our culture. In doing this, they also deemphasize or hide certain aspects of labor and time. We can see what both metaphors hide by examining what they focus on. In viewing labor as a kind of activity, the metaphor assumes that labor can be clearly identified and distinguished from things that are not labor. It makes the assumptions that we can tell work from play and productive activity from nonproductive activity. These assumptions obviously fail to fit reality much of the time, except perhaps on assembly lines, chain gangs, etc. The view of labor as merely a kind of activity, independent of who performs it, how he experiences it, and what it means in his life, hides the issues of whether the work is personally meaningful, satisfying, and humane. The quantification of labor in terms of time, together with the view of time as serving a purposeful end, induces a notion of LEISURE TIME, which is parallel to the concept LABOR TIME. In a society like ours, where inactivity is not considered a purposeful end, a whole industry devoted to leisure activity has evolved. As a result, LEISURE TIME becomes a RESOURCE too—to be spent productively, used wisely, saved up, budgeted, wasted, lost, etc. What is hidden by the RESOURCE metaphors for labor and time is the way our concepts of LABOR and TIME affect our concept of LEISURE, turning it into something remarkably like LABOR. The RESOURCE metaphors for labor and time hide all sorts of possible conceptions of labor and time that exist in other cultures and in some subcultures of our own society: the idea that work can be play, that inactivity can be productive, that much of what we classify as LABOR serves either no clear purpose or no worthwhile purpose.”
― George Lakoff, Metaphors We Live By

“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.”
― George Lakoff, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought

“Cognitive science has something of enormous importance to contribute to human freedom: the ability to learn what our unconscious conceptual systems are like and how our cognitive unconscious functions. If we do not realize that most of our thought is unconscious and that we think metaphorically, we will indeed be slaves to the cognitive unconscious. Paradoxically, the assumption that we have a radically autonomous rationality as traditionally conceived actually limits our rational autonomy. It condemns us to cognitive slavery - to an unaware and uncritical dependence on our unconscious metaphors. To maximize what conceptual freedom we can have, we must be able to see through and move beyond philosophies that deny the existence of an embodied cognitive unconscious that governs most of our mental lives.”
― George Lakoff, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought

“People do not necessarily vote in their self-interest. They vote their identity. They vote their values. They vote for who they identify with.”
― George Lakoff, The All New Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate

“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.”
― George Lakoff, Metaphors We Live By

“The heart of metaphor is inference. Conceptual metaphor allows inferences in sensory-motor domains (e.g., domains of space and objects) to be used to draw inferences about other domains (e.g., domains of subjective judgment, with concepts like intimacy, emotions, justice, and so on). Because we reason in terms of metaphor, the metaphors we use determine a great deal about how we live our lives.”
― George Lakoff, Metaphors We Live By

“One of the fundamental findings of cognitive science is that people think in terms of frames and metaphors […] The frames are in the synapses of our brains, physically present in the form of neural circuitry. When the facts don’t fit the frames, the frames are kept and the facts ignored.”
― George Lakoff, Don't Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate: The Essential Guide for Progressives

“We shall argue that, on the contrary, human thought processes are largely metaphorical. This is what we mean when we say that the human conceptual system is metaphorically structured and defined. Metaphors as linguistic expressions are possible precisely because there are metaphors in a person’s conceptual system.”
― George Lakoff, Metaphors We Live By

“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?”
― George Lakoff, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought

“In philosophy, metaphorical pluralism is the norm. Our most important abstract philosophical concepts, including time, causation, morality, and the mind, are all conceptualized by multiple metaphors, sometimes as many as two dozen. What each philosophical theory typically does is to choose one of those metaphors as "right," as the true literal meaning of the concept. One reason there is so much argumentation across philosophical theories is that different philosophers have chosen different metaphors as the "right" one, ignoring or taking as misleading all other commonplace metaphorical structurings of the concept. Philosophers have done this because they assume that a concept must have one and only one logic. But the cognitive reality is that our concepts have multiple metaphorical structurings.”
― George Lakoff, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought

“What have been called “women’s issues” are freedom issues. Body control. The right of human beings to control their own bodies is a freedom issue. Respect. The right of human beings to be treated institutionally with respect as a human being is a freedom issue.”
― George Lakoff, Don't Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate: The Essential Guide for Progressives

“If you have cancer and you don’t have health care, you are not free. You are probably going to suffer and die. If you are in a car accident and suffer multiple injuries and don’t have health care, you are not free – you may be disabled for life, or die. Even if you break your leg, do not have access to health care, and cannot get it set, you are not free. You may never walk or run freely again. Ill health enslaves you. Disease enslaves you. Even cataracts that rob your vision and can easily be healed by modern medicine will enslave you to blindness without health care. When states turn down funds for Medicaid, that is a freedom issue – both for people who are being denied health care, and for everyone else to whom a curable disease can spread when health care is denied to a significant number of the people they interact with everyday.”
― George Lakoff, Don't Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate: The Essential Guide for Progressives

“Deeply embedded in conservative and liberal politics are different models of the family. Conservatism, as we shall see, is based on a Strict Father model, while liberalism is centered around a Nurturant Parent model. These two models of the family give rise to different moral systems and different discourse forms, that is, different choices of words and different modes of reasoning. Once”
― George Lakoff, Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think

“Taxation is paying your dues, paying your membership fee in America. If you join a country club or a community center, you pay fees. Why? You did not build the swimming pool. You have to maintain it. You did not build the basketball court. Someone has to clean it. You may not use the squash court, but you still have to pay your dues. Otherwise it won’t be maintained and will fall apart. People who avoid taxes, like corporations that move to Bermuda, are not paying their dues to their country. It is patriotic to be a taxpayer. It is traitorous to desert our country and not pay your dues.”
― George Lakoff, Don't Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate: The Essential Guide for Progressives

“Discrimination is a denial of freedom.”
― George Lakoff, Don't Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate: The Essential Guide for Progressives

“As a consequence, it should be true that if you just get the facts out to people, they will reason to the right conclusion. And so year after year, decade after decade, liberals keep telling facts to conservative audiences without changing many minds. This behavior by liberals is itself a form of science denial—the denial of the cognitive and brain sciences. It is simply irrational behavior by many people proud of their rationality. It”
― George Lakoff, Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think

“The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.”
― George Lakoff, Metaphors We Live By

“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.”
― George Lakoff, Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think