Cultural Relativism Quotes

• The idea of cultural relativism is nothing but an excuse to violate human rights.

  Shirin Ebadi

  Rights, Ideas, Excuse

  Interview with Amitabh Pal, progressive.org. September 1, 2004.

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• Historicism and cultural relativism actually are a means to avoid testing our own prejudices and asking, for example, whether men are really equal or whether that opinion is merely a democratic prejudice.

  Allan Bloom

  Mean, Men, Example

  Allan Bloom (2008). “Closing of the American Mind”, p.40, Simon and Schuster

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• Protestant Christianity, whether in its liberal or conservative garb, finds itself waking up each morning in bed with a deteriorating modern culture, between sheets with a raunchy sexual reductionism, despairing scientism, morally normless cultural relativism, and self-assertive individualism. We remain resident aliens, OF the world but not profoundly in it, dining at the banquet table of waning modernity without a whisper of table grace. We all wear biblical name tags (Joseph, David, and Sarah), but have forgotten what our Christian names mean.

  Thomas Oden

  Christian, Morning, Mean

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• How can you defy fear? Fear is a human instinct, just like hunger. Whether you like it or not, you become hungry. Similarly with fear. But I have learned to train myself to live with this fear.

  Shirin Ebadi

  Hunger, Hungry, You Like It

  Interview with Amitabh Pal, September 1, 2004.

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• If anyone, no matter who, were given the opportunity of choosing from amongst all the nations in the world the set of beliefs which he thought best, he would inevitably—after careful considerations of their relative merits—choose that of his own country. Everyone without exception believes his own native customs, and the religion he was brought up in, to be the best.

  Herodotus

  Country, Believe, Opportunity

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• The dogma of cultural relativism is challenged by the very people for whose moral benefit the anthropologists established it in the first place. The complaint the underdeveloped countries advance is not that they are being westernized, but that the westernization is proceeding too slowly.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Country, People, Firsts

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• I just want to say that the multiculturalism - and especially the cultural relativism which is even worse than multiculturalism, the concept that all cultures are equal - is the worst recipe for any society.

  Geert Wilders

  Culture, Recipes, Want

  Source: www.parlementairemonitor.nl

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• Whenever women protest and ask for their rights, they are silenced with the argument that the laws are justified under Islam. It is an unfounded argument. It is not Islam at fault, but rather the patriarchal culture that uses its own interpretations to justify whatever it wants.

  Shirin Ebadi

  Rights, Law, Islam

  Interview with Amitabh Pal, progressive.org. September 1, 2004.

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• I know of no civilization that tolerates or justifies violence, terrorism, or injustice. There is no civilization that justifies the killing of innocent people. Those who are invoking cultural relativism are really using that as an excuse for violating human rights and to put a cultural mask on the face of what they're doing.

  Shirin Ebadi

  Rights, Civilization, People

  Interview with Amitabh Pal, progressive.org. September 1, 2004.

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• [Cultural relativism] licenses the envy of the untalented, giving rise to what has been called the revenge of failure: Those who cannot paint destroy the canons of painting; those who cannot write reject canonical literature.

  George Will

  Revenge, Writing, Giving

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• Europe's greatest problem is cultural relativism. This has led to a situation where Europeans no longer know what they should be proud of and who they really are because a so-called liberal and leftist-imposed concept says that all cultures are the same.

  Geert Wilders

  Europe, Proud, Culture

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• ...discussing cultural relativism with cultural relativists is like playing tennis with some guy who says, "Your ace is just a social construct.

  Mark Steyn

  Tennis, Guy, Aces

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• The only bright feature of cultural relativism's triumph is that it has become establishment orthodoxy and will thus one day be derided, resisted and overthrown.

  Jonathan Meades

  One Day, Triumph, Orthodoxy

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• What I worry about and don't like is the way in which the ideology of multiculturalism has declined into cultural relativism. I think that's very dangerous. When the Archbishop of Canterbury, for God's sake, says that you can't have one law for everybody... that's stupid.

  Salman Rushdie

  Stupid, Thinking, Law

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