Sokal Quotes & Sayings

Our hearts were drunk with a beauty Our eyes could never see. — George William Russell

And I'm a stodgy old scientist who believes, naively, that there exists an external world, that there exist objective truths about that world, and that my job is to discover some of them. — Alan Sokal

And let me tell you something. That first morning, when you are in your country of choice, away from all of the conventions of atypical, everyday lifestyle, looking around at your totally new surroundings, hearing strange languages, smelling strange, new smells, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. You'll feel like the luckiest person in the world. — Rolf Potts

Without the possibility of death,
adventure is not possible. — Reinhold Messner

The meaningless wordplays of modish francophone savants, splendidly exposed in Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont's Intellectual Impostures (1998), seem to have no other function than to impress the gullible. — Richard Dawkins

In a famous hoax, physicist Alan Sokal submitted an article to a leading journal of cultural studies purporting to describe how quantum gravity could produce a "liberatory postmodern science." The article, which parodied the convoluted style of argument in the fashionable academic world of cultural studies, was promptly published by the editors. Sokal announced that his intention was to test the intellectual standards of the discipline by checking whether the journal would publish a piece "liberally salted with nonsense." Sokal, "A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies," April 15, 1996, — Dani Rodrik

Why should self-indulgent nonsense - whatever its professed political orientation - be lauded as the height of scholarly achievement? — Alan Sokal

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

In this atmosphere of general discouragement, it is tempting to attack something that is sufficiently linked to the powers-that-be so as not to appear very sympathetic, but sufficiently weak to be a more-or-less accessible target (since the concentration of power and money are beyond reach). Science fulfills these conditions, and this partly explains the attacks against it. — Alan Sokal

There is a frustration too, that at moments when there's not a coup, when there are not people in the streets, that the country disappears from people's consciousness. — Edwidge Danticat

A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act and without limitations of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority. — Martha Stout

A mode of thought does not become 'critical' simply by attributing that label to itself, but by virtue of its content. — Alan Sokal

None of us, I think, in the mid-'70s ... would have thought we'd be devoting so much mental space now to confront religion. We thought that matter had long been closed. - Ian McEwan — Alan Sokal

Anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. (I live on the twenty-first floor). — Alan Sokal

We have seen in this book numerous ambiguous texts that can be interpreted in two different ways: as an assertion that is true but relatively banal, or as one that is radical but manifestly false. And we cannot help thinking that, in many cases, these ambiguities are deliberate. Indeed, they offer a great advantage in intellectual battles: the radical interpretation can serve to attract relatively inexperienced listeners or readers; and if the absurdity of this version is exposed, the author can always defend himself by claiming to have been misunderstood, and retreat to the innocuous interpretation. — Alan Sokal