Edward Tufte Quotes

It is possible that the distinction between moral relativism and moral absolutism has sometimes been blurred because an excessively consistent practice of either leads to the same practical result — ruthlessness in political life.

Moral relativism says morality is relative, not absolute, I want to show moral relativism, in its popular form, is logically incoherent.

The ideologue says “whatever is right works.” The pragmatist says “whatever works is right.”

I want to give moral relativism the good spanking it deserves.

What is false in the science of facts may be true in the science of values.

Good and evil - I don't believe that there is hanging out there, anywhere, something called good and something called evil.

But I think it is a serious issue to wonder about the other platonic absolutes of say beauty and morality.

The atheist is cheating whenever he makes a moral judgment, acting as though it has an objective reference, when his philosophy in fact precludes it.

The problem of good as it faces the atheist is this: Nature, which is the nuts-and-bolts reality for the atheist, has no values and thus can offer no grounding for good and evil. Values on the atheist view are subjective and contingent.

Moralistic is not moral. And as for truth - well, it's like brown - it's not in the spectrum. Truth is so generic.

We are coming out of a century that was taught that one way of looking at the world, that one form of behavior, is as valid as another. The idea of true evil has been blown away.

In passing, we should note this curious mark of our own age: the only absolute allowed is the absolute insistence that there is no absolute.

Without a clear moral vision, we devolve into moral relativism, and from there, into oblivion.

Right and wrong are not the product of census.

Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute.

I don't subscribe to relativism, whether it's in political philosophy, foreign policy or in life.

Either what we hold to be right and good and true IS right and good and true, for all mankind, or we're just another robber tribe.

If it is solely an evolutionary convenience, there is really no such thing as good or evil.

There can be no final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had his experience and said his say.

The hero can never be a relativist.

In logic, there are no morals.

Just as there is no such thing as Christian physics or Muslim Algebra, we will see tht there is no such thing as Christian or Muslim morality.

Cultural synthesis is how a compromise between various opinions is worked out. But truth does not change, and truth is not arrived at by some sort of compromise.

I've always been someone who's believed in truth. I believe truth exists. I don't believe in relativism, a 'your truth, my truth' kind of a thing. However, I also believe that the truth must always be spoken in love - and that grace and truth are found in Jesus Christ.

Nobody has a franchise on what is good.