Sokal Quotes

#1. The meaningless wordplays of modish francophone savants, splendidly exposed in Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont's Intellectual Impostures (1998), seem to have no other function than to impress the gullible.

Richard Dawkins

#2. I knew what I took upon myself and I was prepared to lose my life by so doing.

Hans Scholl

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

Alan Sokal

#4. There's some songs you can cover, and I've covered and butchered a few, but you can't do them all.

Rick Astley

#5. The problem of restoring integration and co-operation between man's beliefs about the world in which he lives and his beliefs about values and purposes that should direct his conduct is the deepest problem modern life. It is the problem of any philosophy that is not isolated from life.

John Dewey

#6. He foresaw the platooning that managers like Casey Stengel used years before it happened. He told me I had to be a switch-hitter if I was going to play.

Mickey Mantle

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. When I get old and slow down I want to look behind me and see all the fire and the wreckage and no stone left unturned.

Aisha Tyler

#10. 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

#11. It's very lonely, feeling like an outcast. Like you are invited to a costume party, but you are the only one in a mask.

Ellen Schreiber

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

Alan Sokal

#13. 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

#14. Often, the greatest challenge facing an organization is recognizing and acting on opportunity rather than solving a problem.

Peter Ginter

#15. You have to know what you're doing and where you're going. For some guys, the answer is just keep doing what you're doing. For other guys, that might not be the case. It just depends on what kind you are.

Paul Konerko

#16. Look at the Justice Department, it's full of Jews ... The lawyers in government are damn Jews.

Richard M. Nixon