Psychology is not the steady, forward progression of science that everyone says it is. It’s a fact of the sociology of science that, when a theory becomes controversial, people don’t go through it with a fine-toothed comb, selecting out the good parts and the parts that just need a little revision, and throwing out the rest. The way the sociology of science goes, if they get you down, they’re taking you out. Out goes the good along with the bad. The critics become too enthusiastic and throw the baby out with the bathwater.

— Roman Gelperin, The Master Mind of the Self-Actualizing Person

Some anthropologists who are extreme cultural relativists have argued that the laws of science as well as all the theorems of mathematics have no reality apart from human cultures. Laws about gravity, and the fact that 2 + 3 = 5, are not truths that transcend human minds. They are aspects of a culture’s folkways, like its traffic laws or its rules of etiquette.

— Martin Gardner, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener

It seems that the relativists’ strategy of indexing moral truth to cultural norms saddles them with an ethics of authority despite themselves.

— Michael-John Turp, Who’s to Say?

I’m in favor of practical hope, provided that it doesn’t exist at the expense of whatever valid pessimism honesty may stipulate.

— Chad Trainer, The Monarchy of Fear

People invested in not knowing, not thinking about, certain things in order to have “the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved” will be ecstatic when their instinct for consensus is gratified—and wrathful when it is thwarted.

— Alan Jacobs, How to Think