Alan Sokal Quotes
Why should self-indulgent nonsense - whatever its professed political orientation - be lauded as the height of scholarly achievement?
Quotes to Explore
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I've met people who didn't even know there was a Calvin Klein; they thought it was just the name of a product.
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One of the great things about young people is that they do question, that they do care deeply about justice, and they they have open minds.
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If someone is going to criticize what you've written and you believe in what you've written then you should respond.
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I'm active in PAX, which is a gun awareness organization. We treat gun safety as a public health issue.
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So many people are concerned with being the perfect 'something.' Whether it's the perfect singer, the perfect sexy girl, or the perfect feminist. I don't want to be the perfect anything.
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I used to hate performing in front of anybody, but I was forced to sing in front of family, at family gatherings. Then it slowly developed, and I started to love it.
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It's crazy: when it's raining, it makes no sense to me that people drive 10 miles an hour faster than they normally would, but then the other thing that makes no sense is when people drive 30 miles an hour slower than normal.
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It is vitally important for me, both personally and for my writing, to be able to return to China freely, so being barred entry has caused me deep concern and distress.
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Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.
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'Rachael Ray does to food what Hitler did to Poland.' Attributed to credentialed chef Anthony Bourdain.
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The method of 'postulating' what we want has many advantages; they are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil.
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If you're trying to get someone who's sick with a fever off of a submarine and it's cold and raining outside, the only way in and out of a submarine, generally, is through a fairly narrow hatch.
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The power of Haitian heritage and the strength of the Haitian people is tremendous. And Haiti holds a unique and rich role in the history of African Americans.
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There are some movies that I would like to forget, for the rest of my life - really! But even those movies that I'd like to forget teach me things.
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Just after I entered my teens I suddenly entertained an insatiable enthusiasm for the delightful habit of criticizing others.
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I could care less whether the American public knows what I look like.
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Certainly for me, as an astrobiologist, science fiction has played an important role. One of the quandaries of our field is that we are trying to study and search for something - life - that we can't define in a rigorous way. We only have one example of a biosphere, so we can't really give a good definition.
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It took a few years before I realized there was life after football.
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I've known painters who never did any good work because instead of painting their models they seduced them.
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I think we will soon be able to prove the contrary.
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It is fashionable in some academic circles to exercise scholarly criticism of the Bible. In so doing, scholars place themselves above the Bible and seek to correct it. If indeed the Bible is the Word of God, nothing could be more arrogant. It is God who corrects us; we don’t correct Him. We do not stand over God but under Him.
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When you realize that the real breakthroughs come from levels of higher consciousness, then you also realize that the achievement of maturity and wisdom is the most powerful generator of new beginnings possible.
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Dogmatic toleration is nonsense: I would no more tolerate the teaching of Calvinism to children if I had power to persecute it than the British Raj tolerated suttee in India. Every civilized authority must draw a line between the tolerable and the intolerable.
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Why should self-indulgent nonsense - whatever its professed political orientation - be lauded as the height of scholarly achievement?
