The modern habit of saying “This is my opinion, but I may be wrong” is entirely irrational. If I say that it may be wrong, I say that is not my opinion. The modern habit...

We find that in the absence of demonstrable truth, the best we can do is to exercise the greatest diligence, humility, insight, intelligence, and industry in trying to arrive at the nearest values to truth....

Insularity is the foundation of ethnocentrism and intolerance; when you only know of those like yourself, it is easy to imagine that you are alone in the world or alone in being good and right...

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...

Progress in science and technology is real, but it builds on past truths without rejecting them. Computers don’t have to be re-invented in order to keep getting better; innovations expand what they already do. Knowledge...

[Professor Greene’s] reaction to GAMAY, as published in the Yale Daily News, fairly took one’s breath away. He fondled the word “fascist” as though he had come up with a Dead Sea Scroll vouchsafing the...

There is no neutral ground when it comes to the tolerance question. Everybody has a point of view she thinks is right, and everybody passes judgment at some point or another. The Christian gets pigeonholed...

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.

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...

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...

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.

Certain American uses of deconstruction, Derrida has observed, work to ensure ‘an institutional closure’ which serves the dominant political and economic interests of American society. Derrida is clearly out to do more than develop new...

We should challenge the relativism that tells us there is no right or wrong, when every instinct of our mind knows it is not so, and is a mere excuse to allow us to indulge...

Are we truly committed to the notion that ideals and values vary and alter in accordance with changing conditions? Should we not question such a relativistic dogma? Is not the degree of our sensitivity to...

I do not want to drive across a bridge designed by an engineer who believed the numbers in structural stress models are relative truths.

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 –...

In post-Nietzschean spirit, the West appears to be busily undermining its own erstwhile metaphysical foundations with an unholy mélange of practical materialism, political pragmatism, moral and cultural relativism, and philosophical skepticism.

Maybe nothing is completely true, and not even that.

The architects tell us that nothing is great or small save by position.

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,...

Greatness depends on where you are coming from.

When we teach people that suspending moral judgments is a virtue, the necessary outcome is moral horror.

The idea of some kind of objectively constant, universal literary value is seductive. It feels real. It feels like a stone cold fact that In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust, is better than...

Those who grant sympathy to guilt, grant none to innocence.

If the freedom to do as we please is extended to everyone, we lose our freedom. Inevitably, our desire will clash with the desires of others. In the event of such conflict, the strongest individual...

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...

Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.

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...

When our pride usurps Truth, we walk on the shifting sands of relativism, an ego driven reality.

Given our obsession with self, it is hardly surprising we think it is fine for us to live in a world with malleable moral markers, as long as we get our own way without being...

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...

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.

It is reasonable to love the Absolute absolutely for the same reason it is reasonable to love the relative relatively.

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...

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...

The cold logic of mid-twentieth-century atheism has now given way to an era of renewed ‘spirituality,’ but it is an awakening more thrapeutic than pious, more attuned to self-expression than self-denial. It is now fashionable...

Whether a man is a criminal or a public servant is purely a matter of perspective.

Who can say they saw a whole play or read a whole book? Each has their own experience, their own play, their own book

If anyone, no matter who, were given the opportunity of choosing from amongst all the nations in the world the set of beliefs which he thought best, he would inevitably—after careful considerations of their relative...

If truth and moral values are relative, one cannot claim that certain human rights are universally applicable to all cultures and all people.

Now here comes in the whole collapse and huge blunder of our age. We have mixed up two different things, two opposite things. Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to suit...

With no fact as a referent, what is normative is purely a matter of preference.

The sole philosophy open to those who doubt the possibility of truth is absolute silence — even mental.

The reason many are loathe to acknowledge the possibility of absolute truth is not simply because they do not wish to accept the possibility of the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing deity. It is because...

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...

You know the difference between right and wrong,’ he repeated finally. ‘Man, why did you need Initiation—by the Golden Dawn, or by anybody else? You are a genius, a sage, a giant among men. You...

The argument that personal moral views should not be imposed on others when it comes to lawmaking is incoherent and misleading. It is incoherent because a great deal of law implicitly “imposes” a particular moral...

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”.