Obscurantist Quotes & Sayings

Meanwhile, their [evolutionists] unproven theories will continue to be accepted by the learned and the illiterate alike as absolute truth, and will be defended with a frantic intolerance that has a parallel only in the bigotry of the darkest Middle Ages. If one does not accept evolution as an infallible dogma, implicitly and without question, one is regarded as an unenlightened ignoramus or is merely ignored as an obscurantist or a naive, uncritical fundamentalist. — Alfred M. Rehwinkel

The world is divided into two classes, those who believe the incredible, and those who do the improbable. — Oscar Wilde

I can't design anything unless I'm excited by it, meaning I have an urge to wear it. — Rachel Roy

We seem to live in a world where you have to walk around grinning like a loon. I can't understand all the fuss about Mona Lisa painting, everyone wondering why she's not smiling, if she's depressed or heartbroken. No, she was just normal!
Emotions are always extreme these days: you either have to be crying with laughter or crying in pain. No wonder water levels are rising. It's not global warming, it's all the tears from crying. — Karl Pilkington

The purpose of a Christian education would not be merely to make men and women pious Christians: a system which aimed too rigidly at this end alone would become only obscurantist. A Christian education must primarily teach people to be able to think in Christian categories. — T. S. Eliot

That fat speed that I love, that sensation, that's what I want. — Picabo Street

Successful startups are just like jazz bands, masters of improvisation marching to syncopated beats — Mark Anthony Peterson

Miss Duday is absolutely right," I told them. "I don't mean that what she said is right - that I don't know about - but she was right in saying that if you try to hold out and cover up you'll just prolong the agony. It'll all come out, don't think it won't, the bad with the good, and the quicker the better." I looked at the president. "It wouldn't hurt a bit, Mr. Brucker, if you followed Miss Duday's example. Where does everybody stand, the way you see it? For instance, this conference you were having. Whose idea was it? What were you talking about? What were you saying? — Rex Stout

Only too often the works of such authors have been deliberately neglected or suppressed. A case in point is the work by D. Dewar called the Transformist Illusion, Murfreesboro, 1957, which has assembled a vast amount of palaeontological and biological evidence against evolution. The author who was an evolutionist in his youth wrote many monographs which exist in the libraries of comparative zoology and biology everywhere. But his last work, The Transformist Illusion , had to be published in Murfreesboro, Tennessee(!) and is not easy to find even in libraries that have all his earlier works. There is hardly any other field of science where such obscurantist practices are prevalent.
(note 21, p140) — Seyyed Hossein Nasr

Dangerous knowledge is often hidden under ponderous grammar and obscurantist vocabulary. — Brent Weeks

For myself, I am interested in science and in philosophy only because I want to learn something about the riddle of the world in which we live, and the riddle of man's knowledge of that world. And I believe that only a revival of interest in these riddles can save the sciences and philosophy from an obscurantist faith in the expert's special skill and in his personal knowledge and authority. — Karl Popper

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

You are inhuman brutes determined to rob us of our spiritual consolations and sweep away the moral foundations of our civilization, and on the other: You are obscurantist ignoramuses who'd like to shut down progress and drag us all back to the 16th century, with kings and priests telling us what to think. — John Derbyshire

Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs. — Guy Debord

England have nothing to lose here, apart from this test match. — David Lloyd

A man full of warm, speculative benevolence may wish his society otherwise constituted than he finds it; but a good patriot, and a true politician, always considers how he shall make the most of the existing materials of his country. — Edmund Burke

If evolutionism were to be rejected, the whole structure upon which the modern world is based would collapse and one would have to accept the incredible wisdom of the Creator in the creation of the multiplicity of life forms which we see on the surface of the earth and in the seas. This realization would also change the attitude that modern man has concerning the earlier periods of his own history, vis-a-vis other civilizations and also other forms of life. Consequently the theory of evolution continues to be taught in the West as a scientific fact rather than a theory and whoever opposes it is usually brushed off as religious obscurantist. — Seyyed Hossein Nasr

The priest comes. not as an obscurantist, but wearing the intelligible vestments of living faith, divine but positive, ministering in Word and Sacrament that which is humanity's hope and salvation, the divine energy in which he lives with Christ in the Father through the Holy Spirit, identified but not accommodated to the world Christ seeks to save. — Arthur Middleton

Let us banish fear. — Carter G. Woodson

...obscurantist feature in social scientists trying to combine pluralism with environmentalism. They are so preoccupied with the role of prejudice in creating hostile environments that they perpetually deny the obvious, that stereotypes are rough generalizations about groups derived from long-term observation. Such generalizations are usually correct in describing group tendencies and in predicting certain collective actions, even if they do not adequately account for differences among individuals. Nonetheless, as Goldberg explains, the self-described pluralist and prominent psychologist Gordon Allport went out of his way in The Nature of Prejudice (1954) to reject stereotypes as factually inaccurate as well as socially harmful. For Allport and a great many other social Scientists, nothing is intuitively correct unless it is politically so. — Paul Edward Gottfried

We must point out that in what concerns its material the event is not a miracle. What I mean is that what composes an event is always extracted from a situation, always related back to a singular multiplicity, to its state, to the language that is connected to it, etc. In fact, so as not to succumb to an obscurantist theory of creation ex nihilo, we must accept that an event is nothing but a part of a given situation, nothing but a fragment of being. — Alain Badiou

Literally since I could walk ... I was performing. — Lyndsy Fonseca

Malcom clears his throat and Jarrod spins around, Jillian's amulet reflecting the morning sun. 'Kate! — Marianne Curley