Alan Sokal Quotes

#1. Why should self-indulgent nonsense - whatever its professed political orientation - be lauded as the height of scholarly achievement?

Alan Sokal

#2. The relativists' stance is extremely condescending: it treats a complex society as a monolith, obscures the conflicts within it, and takes its most obscurantist factions as spokespeople for the whole.

Alan Sokal

#3. And I'm a stodgy old scientist who believes, naively, that there exists an external world, that there exist objective truths about that world, and that my job is to discover some of them.

Alan Sokal

#4. Anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. (I live on the twenty-first floor).

Alan Sokal

#5. A mode of thought does not become 'critical' simply by attributing that label to itself, but by virtue of its content.

Alan Sokal

#6. None of us, I think, in the mid-'70s ... would have thought we'd be devoting so much mental space now to confront religion. We thought that matter had long been closed. - Ian McEwan

Alan Sokal