Top 100 Relativism's Quotes
#1. The only bright feature of cultural relativism's triumph is that it has become establishment orthodoxy and will thus one day be derided, resisted and overthrown.
Jonathan Meades
#2. In place of moral absolutes, they promote moral relativism and sometimes even question the very existence of truth and reality. To them truth and reality are what we subjectively perceive them to be.
Ben Shapiro
#3. An e-mail from a reader says that liberals like to take the moral high ground, even though their own moral relativism means that there is no moral high ground.
Thomas Sowell
#4. What the historian Elie Kedourie called "the Chatham House Version" - that toxic amalgam of smugness, moral relativism, and cherished feelings of guilt about the achievements of Western civilization - everywhere nurtured the catechism of established opinion.
Roger Kimball
#5. Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the church is often labeled today as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and swept along by every wind of teaching, look like the only attitude acceptable to today's standards.
Pope Benedict XVI
#6. Europe's greatest problem is cultural relativism. This has led to a situation where Europeans no longer know what they should be proud of and who they really are because a so-called liberal and leftist-imposed concept says that all cultures are the same.
Geert Wilders
#7. The issue ultimately involved is whether there is a source of truth higher than, and independent of, man; and the answer to the question is decisive for one's view of the nature and destiny of man.
Richard M. Weaver
#8. Philosophically, I believe that libertarianism - and the wider creed of sound individualism of which libertarianism is a part - must rest on absolutism and deny relativism.
Murray Rothbard
#9. The belief that objective good and evil do not exist (relativism) is in conflict (rivalry) with a rejection of God based on the existence of objective evil.
Gregory Koukl
#10. Each of us would like the ability to do what we want to do, when we want to do it, without incurring the moral approbation of others. We, however, tend to conveniently forget this also gives others the right to do whatever they want.
Stephen McAndrew
#11. In argument about moral problems, relativism is the first refuge of the scoundrel.
Roger Scruton
#12. Whether a man is a criminal or a public servant is purely a matter of perspective.
Tom Robbins
#13. Historicism and cultural relativism actually are a means to avoid testing our own prejudices and asking, for example, whether men are really equal or whether that opinion is merely a democratic prejudice.
Allan Bloom
#14. No culture in history has ever embraced moral relativism and survived. Our own culture, therefore, will either (1) be the first, and disprove history's clearest lesson, or (2) persist in its relativism and die, or (3) repent of its relativism and live. There is no other option.
Peter Kreeft
#15. The idea of cultural relativism is nothing but an excuse to violate human rights.
Shirin Ebadi
#16. Relativism should be confronted where it damages fundamental human rights, because we're not relativists if we believe that the human being should be at the centre of society and the rights of every human being should be respected.
Rocco Buttiglione
#17. The knife of historical relativism ... which has cut to pieces all metaphysics and religion must also bring about healing.
Wilhelm Dilthey
#18. I do not want to drive across a bridge designed by an engineer who believed the numbers in structural stress models are relative truths.
R.C. Sproul
#19. Moral relativism, a position many find attractive only until they are faced with someone who is doing something really, really wrong.
Peter Singer
#21. It is possible that the distinction between moral relativism and moral absolutism has sometimes been blurred because an excessively consistent practice of either leads to the same practical result - ruthlessness in political life.
Richard Hofstadter
#22. If truth and moral values are relative, one cannot claim that certain human rights are universally applicable to all cultures and all people.
Stephen McAndrew
#23. Most relativists believe that relativism is absolutely true and that everyone should be a relativist. Therin lies the self-destructive nature of relativism. The relativist stands on the pinnacle of an absolute truth and wants to relativize everything else.
Norman Geisler
#24. There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective "knowing"; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our "concept" of this thing, our "objectivity," be.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#25. This is pluralism: not a synonym of relativism, but rather an antonym. Pluralism accepts the moral reality of different kinds of truth, but rejects the idea that they can all be placed on a single scale, measured by a single value.
Timothy Snyder
#26. Liberal relativism has its roots in the natural right tradition of tolerance or in the notion that everyone has a natural right to the pursuit of happiness as he understands happiness; but in itself it is a seminary of intolerance.
Leo Strauss
#27. It is reasonable to love the Absolute absolutely for the same reason it is reasonable to love the relative relatively.
Peter Kreeft
#28. The only way into a ministry that sees people's lives change, that brings joy and power and electricity without authoritarianism, is through preaching the gospel to deconstruct both legalism and relativism.
Timothy Keller
#29. Are decisions really products of analysis of a situation; or are simply out of preconceived notions? I believe, at some point of one's existence, we all are troubled by relativism!
L.D.R.
#30. We live in age of compromise, but if we stand on the bedrock of God's truth, we will not bend with the winds of relativism and faithlessness.
R.C. Sproul
#31. An effective proclamation of the Gospel in contemporary Western society will need to confront directly the widespread spirit of agnosticism and relativism which has cast doubt on reason's ability to know the truth, which alone satisfies the human heart's restless quest for meaning.
Pope John Paul II
#32. What I worry about and don't like is the way in which the ideology of multiculturalism has declined into cultural relativism. I think that's very dangerous. When the Archbishop of Canterbury, for God's sake, says that you can't have one law for everybody ... that's stupid.
Salman Rushdie
#33. 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
#34. The tyranny of relativism is the spiritual poverty of our time
Pope Francis
#35. We have made an extraordinary transition. From moral absolutes to moral relativism ... Moral problems become medical ones and yesterday's sinners become today's patients.
Ellen Goodman
#36. Where I grew up, women's liberation was when you let a chick out of her cage for 15 minutes so she could stretch her legs.
John Rachel
#37. Relativism is one of the many crimes committed by intellectuals. It is a betrayal of reason and of humanity.
Karl R. Popper
#38. The dogma of cultural relativism is challenged by the very people for whose moral benefit the anthropologists established it in the first place. The complaint the underdeveloped countries advance is not that they are being westernized, but that the westernization is proceeding too slowly.
Claude Levi-Strauss
#39. When they identify relativism, the belief that there is no absolute truth to guide human behavior, as one of the evils of our times; but you won't find absolute truth if you look for it where it cannot be found: in doctrines, ideologies, sets of rules, or stories.
Eckhart Tolle
#40. The relativism which is not willing to speak about truth but only about 'what is true for me' is an evasion of the serious business of living. It is the mark of a tragic loss of nerve in our contemporary culture. It is a preliminary symptom of death.
Lesslie Newbigin
#41. I've always been someone who's believed in truth. I believe truth exists. I don't believe in relativism, a 'your truth, my truth' kind of a thing. However, I also believe that the truth must always be spoken in love - and that grace and truth are found in Jesus Christ.
Jonathan Jackson
#42. When our pride usurps Truth, we walk on the shifting sands of relativism, an ego driven reality.
Alisa Hope Wagner
#43. Political pundits in Delhi and Islamabad have berated the West for its relativism and double-standards. After all why should Britain have a nuclear arsenal but not India? It is a reasonable question.
Tariq Ali
#44. conformity created maladjustment and tradition could turn psychopathic. Her last sentences urged acceptance of cultural relativism and tolerance of differences.
Lily King
#45. Today's sin is tomorrow's alternative lifestyle.
Marty Rubin
#46. Relativism is not indifference; on the contrary, passionate indifference is necessary in order for you not to hear the voices that oppose your absolute decrees.
Karel Capek
#48. True inner righteousness does not judge according to custom but by the measure of the most perfect law of God Almighty by which the mores of various places and times were adapted to those places and times.
Augustine Of Hippo
#49. In an age of relativism, orthodoxy is the only possible rebellion left
Peter Kreeft
#50. Evil is ancient, unchanging, and with us always. The more postmodern the West becomes - affluent, leisured, nursed on moral equivalence, utopian pacifism, and multicultural relativism - the more premodern the evil among us seems to arise in nihilistic response.
Victor Davis Hanson
#51. [Cultural relativism] licenses the envy of the untalented, giving rise to what has been called the revenge of failure: Those who cannot paint destroy the canons of painting; those who cannot write reject canonical literature.
George Will
#52. I want to give moral relativism the good spanking it deserves.
Peter Kreeft
#53. GON. How lush and lusty the grass looks! how green!
ANT. The ground indeed is tawny.
SEB. With an eye of green in 't.
ANT. He misses not much.
SEB. No; he doth but mistake the truth totally.
William Shakespeare
#54. Remember that the best medical treatment is a sense of relativism. No matter how badly you might feel, take comfort in knowing theres's someone who feels much worse.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
#55. I hate relativism . I hate relativism more than I hate anything else, excepting, maybe, fiberglass powerboats ... surely, surely , no one but a relativist would drive a fiberglass powerboat.
Jerry Fodor
#56. Relative truths can also be absolute.
Relative absolute truths are like two people looking at the same coin, from two different sides, each sees a different truth and presumes they are looking at the same coin, and yet neither side can see the third side.
Caesar J. B. Squitti
#57. You cannot have a boundary-less existence, because your neighbor has his own boundaries, and who is going to give you the ethics between the two boundaries? If there is no objective moral law, relativism will take hold, and relativism ultimately will lead to self-destruction.
Ravi Zacharias
#58. A quest for knowledge is not a war with faith; spirituality is not usually an infelicitous amalgam of superstition and philistinism; and moral relativism, taken outside midfield, leads inexorably both to heresy and to secular wickedness, which are often identical.
Conrad Black
#59. Gray areas are just the inability to distinguish between darkness and light.
Ron Brackin
#60. In the Church he (Lincoln) saw people who, though they hated war as much as the editors did, saw with clarity what the moral alternative was.
Elton Trueblood
#61. Many of us persons of the tinted persuasion care about human rights and artistic freedom too.
Salman Rushdie
#62. We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires.
Pope Benedict XVI
#63. It is not difference that dominates the world, but the obliteration of difference by mimetic reciprocity, which itself, being truly universal, shows the relativism of perpetual difference to be an illusion.
Rene Girard
#64. If you say there is no such thing as morality in absolute terms, then child abuse is not evil, it just may not happen to be your thing.
Rebecca Manley Pippert
#65. Terrorism is the war of the weak and war is the terrorism of the strong.
Martin Bell
#66. Muslims stand by their religion entirely. It is a sort of religious absolutism. While Europeans have stopped defending the values of their civilization. They confuse tolerance with relativism.
Bassam Tibi
#67. Moral stupidity comes in two different forms: relativism and legalism. Relativism sees no principles, only people; legalism sees no people, only principles.
Peter Kreeft
#68. But all morality is of necessity shaped by context. I'm not talking relativism, no. To ignore the context of a decision is in fact immoral.
Anne Rice
#69. When we teach people that suspending moral judgments is a virtue, the necessary outcome is moral horror.
Peter Boghossian
#70. Relativism is the solution of one who is incapable of putting things in order.
Nicolas Gomez Davila
#71. The only consistent response for a relativist is, "Pushing morality is wrong for me, but that's just my personal opinion, and has nothing to do with you. Please ignore me.
Gregory Koukl
#72. Those who grant sympathy to guilt, grant none to innocence.
Ayn Rand
#73. In college, [Christian students] are assaulted by secular relativism, and if we don't prepare them, they will be like lambs led to slaughter.
Charles Colson
#74. Moral relativism be damned, Riz. There's them, and there's us, and we fight and die for us and that's it.'
Holly "Bang-Bang" Kirpachi
Charlie Flowers
#75. At every period of history, people have believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you risked ostracism or even violence by saying otherwise. If our own time were any different, that would be remarkable. As far as I can tell it isn't.
Paul Graham
#76. Thus, relativism removes one of our most powerful motives to study the views of the other-the idea that the other might be right and we might be wrong.
David Detmer
#77. Bitter experience has taught me that you don't engage with intellectually superior wankers who make long speeches about moral relativism.
Alexis Hall
#78. Since the fall of the human race, we've been alternately telling ourselves that we are good, that if we try hard enough we'll be good enough, or that being or that being good is an impossibility, so we should just give up and have fun.
Elyse M. Fitzpatrick
#79. Babette looked too good for the place tonight, but then goodness is only relative after all ("Steps Going Up" aka "Guillotine" aka "Men Must Die")
Cornell Woolrich
#80. Moral relativism says morality is relative, not absolute, I want to show moral relativism, in its popular form, is logically incoherent.
Peter Kreeft
#81. The modern university is the institution through which the next generation's elite is formed. It inculcates the two essential, nonnegotiable principles of the American ruling class: consumerism and relativism.
Jonathan V. Last
#82. No age has been more prone to confuse the sin with the sinner, not by hating the sinner along with the sin but by loving the sin along with the sinner. We often use "compassion" as an equivalent for moral relativism.
Peter Kreeft
#83. The problem is that relativism provides no sure foundation for a safe and orderly society.
Charles Colson
#84. Without a clear moral vision, we devolve into moral relativism, and from there, into oblivion.
Ben Shapiro
#85. The gospel of Jesus Christ is an offense to both religion and irreligion. It can't be co-opted by either moralism or relativism.
Timothy J. Keller
#86. No-one can own our Lord Buddha. That would be a foolish claim, but the roads that lead to him, the Way... That is a different matter. They are all filled with toll-gates, like the roads of Japan, and the monks collect the fees.
Erik Christian Haugaard
#87. Whatever we may think of the merits of torturing children for pleasure, and no doubt there is much to be said on both sides, I am sure we all agree that it should be done with sterilized instruments.
G.K. Chesterton
#89. Moral relativism denies the "immoral" minority the chance to argue logically against a "moral" majority, if there is no standard
J. Warner Wallace
#90. Relative terms do not make for relative truths. All truth values are absolute in their own context, because all statements either correspond to reality or they do not.
Douglas Beaumont
#91. All ethics and morals are culturally relative. And Esme's reaction taught me that while cultural relativism is an easy concept to process intellectually, it is not, for many, an easy one to remember.
Hanya Yanagihara
#92. If it is true that we cannot possess knowledge of what is good in any absolute sense, it is equally true that we have an ethical duty to decide between what is better and what is worse.
Richard Kearney
#93. You cannot solve the problem by turning to communism, for communism is based on an ethical relativism and a metaphysical materialism that no Christian can accept.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#94. It is only to the sentimentalist over some tame midland prospect that man appears vile. In Sirene he holds his own with the sublime eccentricity of the natural scene. In Sirene he lives.
Compton Mackenzie
#95. In contrast to ethical relativism, Christianity sets forth a system of absolute moral values and affirms that God has placed within the very structure of this universe certain moral principles that are fixed and immutable.
Martin Luther
#96. Egalitarian and relativistic sentiments find steady support among ever new generations of adolescents. Owing to their still incomplete mental development, juveniles, especially of the male variety, are always susceptible to both ideas.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe
#97. Relativism poses as freedom but it is just another form of tyranny: You must believe that all religions are equal because we say they are. You must agree with us that everything is relative, or we will punish you.
Jeffrey Burton Russell
#98. If you depart from moral absolutes, you go into a bottomless pit. Communism and Nazism were catastrophic evils which both derived from moral relativism. Their differences were minor compared to their similarities.
Paul Johnson
#99. I don't know what it is about "magic happens"-stickers on cars but every time I see one I wanna get out my permanent marker and sneak over and write underneath it "so does cot death".
Tim Minchin
#100. Today there seems to be only one absolute thing: relativism.
Joseph Goebbels
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