Bret Weinstein Quotes

So many of our institutions have been overtaken by schools of thought, which are inherently a dead end.

The 9/11 attack was symbolic. It was not designed to cripple us economically or militarily, at least not directly. It was designed to provoke a reaction.

For many reasons, the natural thing is for Americans to unify under some banner in order to regain power over the policymaking structure.

Is there a free speech crisis on college campuses? One can certainly make that argument, but that portrayal is at least as misleading as it is informative.

Since universities are funded in large parts by grants that depend on costly research, they have every incentive to free professors from their teaching duties as much as possible – as do the professors themselves, who tend to be recruited and promoted primarily based on research output.

I hear many people talking as if the terms liberal, progressive and leftist refer to different factions, and that one might partner with one and reject another. I have been on the left my entire adult life. I never have seen clean distinctions drawn between these things.

At heart, human beings are what we may call ‘generalists,’ who have the ability to adapt their internal ‘software programs‘ to different habitats or situations.

We are not made safe from terrorists by helicopters, or missiles or boots on the ground. Nor is it drones, torture or digital dragnets that protect us. What makes us as individuals safe from a terror attack is the staggering probability that we will be elsewhere when one occurs.

On a college campus, people should be equally free to be on campus, irrespective of their skin color.

What is occurring on college campuses is about power and control – speech is impeded as a last resort, used when people fail to self-censor in response to a threat of crippling stigma and the destruction of their capacity to earn.

When I talk about ‘apolitical‘ or ‘nonpartisan’ change, I mean first and foremost exploring root causes with due seriousness and at least agreeing on what they are.

I don’t think that we can say that the entire educational apparatus is a failure. But we can say that the part of the apparatus that is a failure is taking over more and more territory.

Terrorists do not engage in terror attacks because they are strong. They engage in these attacks because they are weak.

We are now seeing a movement that wishes to place race back at the forefront of our political thinking and, frighteningly, that viewpoint seems to be shared by those on the far left and the far right. We cannot remain cohesive as a nation if we are attacking each other on the basis.

Belief systems have flourished because they have facilitated the interests of the creatures involved.

There’s a very big difference between people deciding to absent themselves from a shared space in order to make a point, which I support, and people deciding to absent somebody else, which I’m absolutely opposed to.

There was a time when the term liberal had been so thoroughly demonized by those on the right that I remember consciously choosing to call myself a progressive in order to evade the stigma. But there was no change in my perspective that accompanied it.

If one’s desire for change is an earnest desire to see things improve, then surely there is a state in which things have been improved to the point where you would hope to conserve a structure rather than alter it. At that point, you become a conservative.

On a college campus, one’s right to speak – or to be – must never be based on skin color.

Terrorism is a tactic in which the primary objective is to produce fear, rather than direct harm. Terrorist attacks are, first and foremost, psychological operations designed to alter behavior amongst the terrorized in a way that the actors believe will serve them.

To women, Americans of color, and the citizens of the world, Donald Trump, if he is taken at his word, represents a threat to you all.

Colleges have to be about discovering what we don’t yet know and that process will come to a screeching halt if we are leveling threats of bias over the way people phrase things.

The button-down empirical and deductive fields, including all the hard sciences, have lived side by side with ‘critical theory,’ postmodernism and its perception-based relatives. Since the creation in 1960s and ’70s of novel, justice-oriented fields, these incompatible worldviews have repelled one another.

Day of Absence is a tradition at Evergreen.

The idea that we should prioritize a racial viewpoint on, who knows, maybe even organic chemistry, over somebody who is adept at understanding how to convey a difficult concept, is preposterous, just at an educational level.