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Relativism Quotes

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Relativism Quotes

“كان خوفاً يهزم خوفاً من نوع آخر، خوف من خطر محقّق يهزم خوفاً من خطر محتمل. حياتنا تدور في هذه النسبية التي تحكم كل شيء، كل علاقاتنا وأفكارنا وقراراتنا وتصرّفاتنا، سواء أدركنا ذلك أو لم ندرك.”

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Book:صراع الأقنعة
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“But I cannot be worrying-worrying all the time about the truth. I have to worry about the truth that can be lived with. And that is the difference between losing your marbles drinking the salty sea, or swallowing the stuff from the streams. My Niece-of-Shame believes in the talking cure, eh?" says Alsana, with something of a grin. "Talk, talk, talk and it will be better. Be honest, slice open your heart and spread the red stuff around. But the past is made of more than words, dearie. We married old men, you see? These bumps"--Alsana pats them both --"they will always have daddy-long-legs for fathers. One leg in the present, one in the past. No talking will change this. Their roots will always be tangled. And roots get dug up. Just look in my garden - birds at the coriander every bloody day...”

TruthPastTalkingHonestyFuturePregnancySanityWorryingRelativismDaddy Long Legs
Book:White Teeth
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“Il rifiuto del riferimento a Dio non è espressione di una tolleranza che vuole proteggere le religioni non teistiche e la dignità di atei e degli agnostici, ma piuttosto espressione di una coscienza che vorrebbe vedere Dio cancellato definitivamente dalla vita pubblica dell'umanità e accantonato nell'ambito soggettivo di residue culture del passato. Il relativismo, che costituisce il punto di partenza di tutto questo, diventa così un dogmatismo che si crede in possesso della definitiva conoscenza della ragione, ed il diritto di considerare tutto il resto soltanto come uno stadio dell'umanità in fondo superato e che può essere adeguatamente relativizzato.”

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Author:Benedict XVI
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“Avere una fede chiara, secondo il Credo della Chiesa, viene spesso etichettato come fondamentalismo. Mentre il relativismo, cioè il lasciarsi portare "qua e là da qualsiasi vento di dottrina*, appare come l'unico atteggiamento all'altezza dei tempi odierni. Si va costituendo una dittatura del relativismo che non riconosce nulla come definitivo e che lascia come ultima misura solo il proprio io e le sue voglie.”

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Author:Benedict XVI
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“If you reject Absolute Truth, as Discordians do, you are thereby claiming that any doxa (opinion, belief ) is as valid as any other doxa, and t hus we enter the absurdist world of non-knowledge, of “ all truths ” = “ all lies ” . There is neither truth nor falsehood, just what people arbitrarily choose to call truth or falsehood at any instant, according to their shifting beliefs, opinions and speculations . This is exactly what the Discordians subscribe to in their demented war against knowledge and truth. Discordians are ignoramuses who oppose and sneer at reason an d logic. They are those who burn down the Tree of Knowledge , without ever having eaten from it . Instead, t hey have devoured the fruit of the Tree of Ignorance.”

PhilosophyLiesRelativismSubjectivismIlluminismDiscordianismAll Truths
Book:Illuminism Contra Discordianism
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“It's God that's worrying me. That's the only thing that's worrying me. What if He doesn't exist? What if Rakitin's right -that it's an idea made up by men? Then, if He doesn't exist, man is the king of the earth, of the universe. Magnificent! Only how is he going to be good without God? That's the question. I always come back to that. Who is man going to love then? To whom will he be thankful? To whom will he sing the hymn? Rakitin laughs. Rakitin says that one can love humanity instead of God. Well, only an idiot can maintain that. I can't understand it. Life's easy for Rakitin. 'You'd better think about the extension of civic rights, or of keeping down the price of meat. You will show your love for humanity more simply and directly by that, than by philosophy.' I answered him: 'Well, but you, without a God, are more likely to raise the price of meat if it suits you, and make a rouble on every penny.' He lost his temper. But after all, what is goodness? Answer that, Alyosha. Goodness is one thing with me and another with a Chinaman, so it's relative. Or isn't it? Is it not relative? A treacherous question! You won't laugh if I tell you it's kept me awake for two nights. I only wonder now how people can live and think nothing about it. Vanity!”

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Book:The Brothers Karamazov
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“Let us suppose for a moment that the harder virtues could really be theoretically justified with no appeal to objective value. It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous. Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite sceptical about ethics, but bred to believe that 'a gentleman does not cheat', than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers. In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment. The crudest sentimentalism […] about a flag or a country or a regiment will be of more use. We were told it all long ago by Plato. As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the 'spirited element'. The head rules the belly through the chest—he seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment—these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.”

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Book:THE ABOLITION OF MAN
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“Either we are rational spirit obliged forever to obey the absolute values of the Tao, or else we are mere nature to be kneaded and cut into new shapes for the pleasures of masters who must, by hypothesis, have no motive but their own 'natural' impulses. Only the Tao provides a common human law of action which can over-arch rulers and ruled alike. A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery. I am not here thinking solely, perhaps not even chiefly, of those who are our public enemies at the moment. The process which, if not checked, will abolish Man goes on apace among Communists and Democrats no less than among Fascists. The methods may (at first) differ in brutality. But many a mild-eyed scientist in pincenez, many a popular dramatist, many an amateur philosopher in our midst, means in the long run just the same as the Nazi rulers of Germany/Traditional values are to be 'debunked' and mankind to be cut out into some fresh shape at the will (which must, by hypothesis, be an arbitrary will) of some few lucky people in one lucky generation which has learned how to do it. The belief that we can invent 'ideologies' at pleasure, and the consequent treatment of mankind as mere υλη, specimens, preparations, begins to affect our very language. Once we killed bad men: now we liquidate unsocial elements. Virtue has become integration and diligence dynamism, and boys likely to be worthy of a commission are ‘potential officer material'. Most wonderful of all, the virtues of thrift and temperance, and even of ordinary intelligence, are sales-resistance.”

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Book:THE ABOLITION OF MAN
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“The Sophists start by postulating that there are no limits to what education can accomplish and they maintain, in contrast to the old mystical belief in breeding, that ‘virtue’ can be taught. Western culture, which is based on self-consciousness, self-observation and self-criticism, has its origin in their idea of education. They initiated the history of Western rationalism, with its criticism of dogmas, myths, traditions and conventions. They are the discoverers of historical relativity—the recognition that scientific truths, ethical standards and religious creeds are all historically conditioned. They are the first to realize that all norms and standards, whether in science, law, morality, mythology or art, are creations of human minds and hands. They discover the relativity of truth and falsehood, right and wrong, good and evil. They recognize the pragmatic motives underlying human valuations, and thus pave the way for all subsequent endeavour in the field of humanistic enlightenment. It is to be noted that their rationalism and relativism are connected with the same trend of economy and the same general impulse towards free competition and moneymaking as gave rise to the Renaissance emancipation of science, the enlightenment of the eighteenth century and the materialism of the nineteenth. Their experience of ancient capitalism aroused the same reactions in them as the experience of modern capitalism does in their successors.”

EducationEnlightenmentHumanismRelativismSophistsAnti AristocracyWestern Rationalism
Book:The Social History of Art, Volume 1: From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages
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“Neither are the humanistic scholars and artists of any great help these days. They used to be, and were supposed to be, as a group, carriers of and teachers of the eternal verities and the higher life. The goal of humanistic studies was defined as the perception and knowledge of the good, the beautiful, and the true. Such studies were expected to refine the discrimination between what is excellent and what is not (excellence generally being understood to be the true, the good, and the beautiful). They were supposed to inspire the student to the better life, to the higher life, to goodness and virtue. What was truly valuable, Matthew Arnold said, was 'the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world.' [...] No, it is quite clear from our experience of the last fifty years or so that the pre-1914 certainties of the humanists, of the artists, of the dramatists and poets, of the philosophers, of the critics, and of those who are generally inner-directed have given way to a chaos of relativism. No one of these people now knows how and what to choose, nor does he know how to defend and validate his choice.”

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Book:Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences
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“The truth is, Jung has brought back one member of the old duality, unreason, with a new name; it is no synthesis at all, but only the latest maneuver in the war against rationality that has been conducted with rising hysteria by literary intellectuals and humanists against the laws of a culture they have reason to distrust and disobey. The Jungian theory proposes to every disaffected humanist his "personal myth," as a sanctuary against the modern world. Against the vulgar democracy of intelligence, Jungian theory proposes an aristocracy of feeling. From this proposal derives Jung's persistent influence on modern critical and aesthetic style.”

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Book:The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud
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“The only absolute truth is change, and death is the only way to stop change. Life is a series of judgments on changing situations, and no ideal, no belief fits every solution. Yet humans need to believe in something beyond themselves. Perhaps all intelligences do. If we do not act on higher motivations, then we can justify any action, no matter how horrible, as necessary for our survival. We are endlessly caught between the need for high moral absolutes—which will fail enough that any absolute can be demonstrated as false—and our tendency for individual judgments to degenerate into self-gratifying and unethical narcissism. Trying to force absolutes on others results in death and destruction, yet failing to act beyond one's self also leads to death and destruction, generally a lot sooner.”

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Book:The Parafaith War
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“Nietzsche viewed morality as an evolving weapon wielded by one group against another for self-interested reasons. There’s no doubt that Nietzsche is correct that no absolute moral code can be established since there is no absolute, objective, unambiguous standard to which to appeal, and upon which everyone would agree. However, rational morality at least gives us a framework to which all rational people can subscribe, and that’s as good as it can ever get.”

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Book:Kill Religion!: The Deserved Death of Faith
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“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.”

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Book:Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought
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“Relativism poses as humble by saying: “We are not smart enough to know what the truth is—or if there is any universal truth.” It sounds humble. But look carefully at what is happening. It’s like a servant saying: I am not smart enough to know which person here is my master—or if I even have a master. The result is that I don’t have a master and I can be my own master. That is in reality what happens to relativists: In claiming to be too lowly to know the truth, they exalt themselves as supreme arbiter of what they can think and do. This is not humility. This is the essence of pride.”

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Book:Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God
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“I do not have it in for relativism. In many respects I find it a fascinating, even attractive, alternative. It engenders epistemological humility, defeats an arrogant pomposity in belief, even promotes a sort of democratic ideal in matters of knowledge. Perhaps its most comforting feature is that it requires no hard work at all in the matter of justifying beliefs.”

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Book:Epistemology: The Justification of Belief
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“The idea so commonly found that scepticism leads to toleration arises from considering the effects of scepticism in the intellectual who takes no active part - not its effects in the man of action. In the man of action, moral relativism and scepticism as to the absolute and universal value of his priunciples are no obstacle to a fanatical belief in their immediate value as his own clan at the actual moment; they do not weaken in the least his will to impose his principles. How should he glimpse a soul of truth in the principles of others, entitling them to respect, when he does not believe in noble origins of this kind even for his own principles?”

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Book:Sovereignty: An Inquiry into the Political Good
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“Reason and logic are a force for unity. People can rally around the objective, absolute Truth. All of these are undermined by the Dunning-Kruger effect, by the rise of irrationalism. Today, the world is full of subjectivists and relativists who actively sneer at the Truth and proclaim that everyone has their own truth. When you start believing your own truth, your own propaganda, your own bullshit, you become a narcissist. You think you are a god, and that no one is allowed to contradict you. After all, who are they to challenge your truth?”

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Book:Dumbocalypse Now: The First Dunning-Kruger President
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“In today’s world, the cult of the individual is the new religion. No one is allowed to contradict the individual, to tell him he’s wrong, a waste of space, a liability, a degenerate. We have to pretend that all individuals – no matter how vile – are sacred. We are not allowed to take any action against them, to reform them, correct them, educate them. After all, everyone has their own truth, so everyone is automatically right.”

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Book:The Liberty Wars: The Trump Time Bomb
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“My definition of Theology My proverb of theology is a doctrine study of overall foundation of biblical notions, transcendence, an scriptures relativist, researcher and conservative of the Word of God with sensible and measured pursuit of infinite growth, a marriage of the spiritual knowledge (Gnosis), and unutterable love for the faith in constant pursuits and mission for truths with devoutness to prowess faith and love from faith’s vocation and noetic that’s flamed within that gives us the calling (vocation) of theologian. For theology pursues and endless journey of the Lord’s knowledge while maintaining the faith and is the strength hold of creed that manifest purpose, ontology and guardianship of the soul and wisdom, in a relation, a sound mind for divinity. . .”

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Book:Awakening Kings and Princes Volume I
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“Every little thing makes a difference, whether you decide it yourself or whether it’s pure accident. So many people have had the whole course of their lives changed by something perfectly simple like, let’s say, crossing the street at one point instead of another.” “Yes, yes, yes, I know,” Stenham said with exaggerated weariness. “As far as I’m concerned that’s just as boring, and a lot more false, by the way. The point I’m trying to make is that he loves his world of Koranic law because it’s his, and at the same time he hates it because his intuition tells him it’s at the end of its rope. He can’t expect anything more from it. And our world, he hates that too, just on general principles, and yet it’s his only hope, the only way out—if there is one for him personally, which I doubt.”

CultureColonialismImperialismModernityModernismWestern CivilizationRelativismMoroccoWay Of LifeKoranFrench MoroccoWestern Dominion
Book:The Spider's House
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“Some argue that in time there was a noticeable change in Ratzinger's position held during the Council. However, as he himself said, and others would say about him, "It is not Ratzinger who has somehow changed and suddenly become reactionary and conservative. It is the secular culture that has drifted beyond the pale.”

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Book:The Dictatorship of Relativism: Pope Benedicts XVI's Response
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“Make no mistake, the war between Illuminists and Discordians is the war between intelligent people and stupid people, rationalists and irrationalists, Logos and Mythos, evolution and dinosaurs, order and chaos, understanding and incomprehension, Truth and “all truths” (= no truths), objectivity and subjectivity, absolutism and relativism, knowledge and ignorance ("Humans know nothing"), answers and no answers. Which side are you on?! Discordians don’t want to “know”. They want to not know and to sneer at all Gnostics, scientists and mathematicians (knowers and l earners), and call them liars or deluded. We, however – using the motto of the Enlightenment, of the Age of Reason – resoundingly reply ... Sapere Aude (“Dare to Know”)”

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Book:Illuminism Contra Discordianism
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“Make no mistake, the war between Illuminists and Discordians is the war between intelligent people and stupid people, rationalists and irrationalists, Logos and Mythos, evolution and dinosaurs, order and chaos, understanding and incomprehension, Truth and “all truths” (= no truths), objectivity and subjectivity, absolutism and relativism, knowledge and ignorance ("Humans know nothing"), answers and no answers. Which side are you on?! Discordians don’t want to “know”. They want to not know and to sneer at all Gnostics, scientists and mathematicians (knowers and learners), and call them liars or deluded. We, however – using the motto of the Enlightenment, of the Age of Reason – resoundingly reply ... Sapere Aude (“Dare to Know”)”

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Author:Brother Cato
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“People with no qualifications whatsoever in mathematics, science and philosophy continuously proclaim, “My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” In fact, one of their tactics is to attempt to demolish knowledge by claiming that whatever anyone says is just “subjective”. Are science and math as “subjective” as Eastern religion? Science and math objectively landed men on the moon!”

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Book:Illuminism Contra Discordianism
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“Not merely is the art of the second half of the fifth century influenced by the same experience which formed the ideas of the Sophists; a spiritual movement such as theirs, with its stimulating humanism, was bound to have a direct effect upon the outlook of the poets and artists. When we come to the fourth century there is no branch of art in which their influence cannot be traced. Nowhere is the new spirit more striking than in the new type of athlete which, with Praxiteles and Lysippus, now supplants the manly ideal of Polycletus. Their Hermes and Apoxyomenos have nothing of the heroic, of aristocratic austerity and disdain about them; they give the impression of being dancers rather than athletes. Their intellectuality is expressed not merely in their heads; their whole appearance emphasizes that ephemeral quality of all that is human which the Sophists had pointed out and stressed. Their whole being is dynamically charged and full of latent force and movement. When you try to look at them they will not allow you to rest in any one position, for the sculptor has discarded all thought of principal view-points; on the contrary, these works underline the incompleteness and momentariness of each ephemeral aspect to such a degree as to force the spectator to be altering his position constantly until he has been round the whole figure. He is thus made aware of the relativity of each single aspect, just as the Sophists became aware that every truth, every norm and every standard has a perspective element and alters as the view-point alters. Art now frees itself from the last fetters of the geometrical; the very last traces of frontality now disappear. The Apoxyomenos is completely absorbed in himself, leads his own life and takes no notice of the spectator. The individualism and relativism of the Sophists, the illusionism and subjectivity of contemporary art, alike express the spirit of economic liberalism and democracy—the spiritual condition of people who reject the old aristocratic attitude towards life, with all its gravity and magnificence, because they think they owe everything to themselves and nothing to their ancestors, and who give vent to all their emotions and passions with complete lack of restraint because so whole-heartedly convinced that man is the measure of all things.”

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Book:The Social History of Art, Volume 1: From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages
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“Relativism reduces every element of absoluteness to relativity while making a completely illogical exception in favor of this reduction itself. Fundamentally it consists in propounding the claim that there is no truth as if this were truth or in declaring it to be absolutely true that there is nothing but the relatively true; one might just as well say that there is no language or write that there is no writing. In short, every idea is reduced to a relativity of some sort, whether psychological, historical, or social; but the assertion nullifies itself by the fact that it too presents itself as a psychological, historical, or social relativity. The assertion nullifies itself if it is true and by nullifying itself logically proves thereby that it is false; its initial absurdity lies in the implicit claim to be unique in escaping, as if by enchantment, from a relativity that is declared to be the only possibility.”

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Book:Logic and Transcendence
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“You heard him say it? 'Pain's the only evil I know about.' You heard that?" The monk nodded solemnly. "And that society is the only thing that determines whether an act is wrong or not? That too?" "Yes." "Dearest God, how did those two heresies get back into the world after all this time? Hell has limited imaginations down there. 'The serpent deceived me, and I did eat.”

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Book:A Canticle For Leibowitz
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“The dominant philosophy in today’s public university is called relativism, which categorically denies the existence of truth or moral absolutes. Those who are foolish enough to believe in such archaic notions as biblical authority or the claims of Christ are to be pitied—or bullied.”

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Book:Life on the Edge: The Next Generation's Guide to a Meaningful Future
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“In other words, the boundary between that which is objectively true and that which is subjectively experienced ceased to be accepted. The perception of society as formed of individuals interacting with universal reality in unique ways - which underlies the liberal principles of individual freedom, shared humanity, and equal opportunities - was replaced by multiple allegedly equally valid knowledges and truths, constructed by groups of people with shared markers of identity related to their positions in society.”

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Author:Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay
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