It is all very well for us, sitting pretty, to think that material standards of living don’t matter all that much. It is all very well for one, as a personal choice, to reject industrialisation—do a modern Walden if you like, and if you go without much food, see most of your children die in infancy, despise the comforts of literacy, accept twenty years off your own life, then I respect you for the strength of your aesthetic revulsion. But I don’t respect you in the slightest if, even passively, you try to impose the same choice on others who are not free to choose. In fact, we know what their choice would be. For, with singular unanimity, in any country where they have had the chance, the poor have walked off the land into the factories as fast as the factories could take them.

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now

Can human beings thrive and be fulfilled in the absence of a transcendent order capable of giving an objective foundation to meaning, morals, purpose, and hope?

— Stephen Anderson, Hap & Happiness

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?