Woke Quotes

“At its heart, wokeness is divisive, exclusionary, and hateful. It basically gives mean people a shield to be mean and cruel, armored in false virtue.”
― Elon Musk

“Real healing begins in life, and real awakening starts to happen when we stop living through emotion and start living through love.”
― Sonia Choquette, The Psychic Pathway: A Workbook for Reawakening the Voice of Your Soul

“In developed countries, we have less to fear from infectious parasites, but much more to fear from infectious memes. So, instead of opening our bodies to ambient germs, we open our minds to ambient culture, to determine if we can stay sane throughout the onslaught.”
― Geoffrey Miller, Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior

“The highly open expose themselves to new experiences, cultures, people, relationships, norms, ideas, worldviews, art, music, sexual practices, and drugs. They can get infected by nasty, maladaptive memes; they might end up believing in astrology, homeopathy, or Scientology.”
― Geoffrey Miller, Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior

“The distorted concept of 'loving thyself' in our times is the root of all evil. It leads to egotistical and narcissistic behaviour, and loss of touch with reality. 'Loving' yourself more than anything and anyone else leaves you disabled. Half-human. You sacrifice your empathy, tact, communication skills and dare I say, intelligence. You willingly cease your own spiritual growth and development of character (because you keep repeating to yourself that you're perfect just the way you are). The consequences are stagnation and later on, decay. Ultimately, you lose your soul.”
― R.P. Heaven, Awakening Ignited

“The principle of skepticism common among postmodernists is frequently referred to as -radical skepticism-. It says, -all knowledge is constructed: what is interesting is theorizing about why knowledge got constructed this way-. Thus, radical skepticism is markedly different from the scientific skepticism that characterized the Enlightenment.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“The postmodern view wrongly insists that scientific thought is unable to distinguish itself as especially reliable and rigorous in determining what is and isn't true. Scientific reasoning is construed as a metanarrative -a sweeping explanation of how things work- and postmodernism is radically skeptical of all such explanations. In postmodern thinking, that which is known is only known within the cultural paradigm that produced the knowledge and is therefore representative of its systems of power. As a result, postmodernism regards knowledge as provincial and intrinsically political.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“Progress ocurred fastest of all in the 1960 and 1970s, when racial and gender discrimination became illegal and homosexuality was decriminalized. This all ocurred before postmodernism became influential. Postmodernism did not invent ethical opposition to oppressive power systems and hierarchies -in fact, much of the most significant social and ethical progress ocurred during the preceding periods that it rejects and continues to be brought about by applying the methods of liberalism.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“Almost every social significant category has been intentionally complicated and problematized by postmodern Theorists in order to deny such categories any objective validity and disrupt the systems of power that might exist across them.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“We therefore might think of postmodernism as a kind of fast-evolving virus. Its original and purest form was unsustainable: it tore its hosts apart and destroyed itself. It could not spread from the academy to the general population because it was so difficult to grasp and so seemingly removed from social realities. In its evolved form, it spread, leaping the species gap from academics to activists to everyday people, as it became increasingly graspable and actionable and therefore more contagious.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“Queer Theory is about liberation from the normal, especially where it comes to norms of gender and sexuality. This is because it regards the very existence of categories of sex, gender and sexuality to be oppressive. Because queer Theory derives directly from postmodernism, it is radically skeptical that these categories are based in any biological reality. It thus ignores biology nearly completely (or places it downstream of socialization) and focuses upon them as social constructions perpetuated in language.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“Like the other postmodern Theories, queer Theory is a political project, and its aim is to disrupt any expectations that people should fit into a binary position with regard to sex or gender, and to undermine any assumptions that sex or gender are related to or dictate sexuality.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“In Marxist thought, power is like a weight, pressing down on the proletariat. For Foucault, power operated more like a grid, running through all layers of society and determining what people held to be true and, consequently, how they spoke about it.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“One problem with taking on a physical or mental disability as an identity is that it disincentivizes any possible mitigation of the disability.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“Consequently, we now have Social Justice texts -forming a kind of Gospel of Social Justice- that express, with absolute certainty, that all white people are racist, all men are sexist, racism and sexism are systems that can exist and oppress absent even a single person with racist of sexist intentions or beliefs (in the usual sense of the terms). sex is not biological and exists on a spectrum, language can be literal violence, denial of gender identity is killing people, the wish to remedy disability and obesity is hateful, and everything needs to be decolonized.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“Mental health activism also frequently regards mental illness as a marginalized identity. One problem with this approach is that people tend to get attached to their identities and this may discourage some from seeking treatment and trying to recover.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“The ideas of Social Justice scholarship often look good on paper. That's almost always the way with bad theories.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“Communism is a great example of the human tendency to fail to appreciate how our best theories can fail catastrophically in practice, l even if their adherents are motivated by an idealistic vision of "the greater good".”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“Social Justice cannot succeed because it does not correspond with reality or with core human intuitions of fairness and reciprocity and because it is an idealistic metanarrative.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“Religions and many theoretical constructions are metanarratives, but liberalism and science are not.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“People in liberal systems are free to believe anything they wish, and they're free to argue for anything they want, but to claim that such beliefs are knowledge and demand they be respected as such is another matter.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“Before 2020, I was naive. I thought that racism, intolerance, supremacism, and bigotry were isolated to the ideals of a tiny, narrow-minded group of people. I was wrong.”
― J.R. Whitsell, First Mover Advantage: A Novel

“From election law to environmentalism to radical social agendas to the second amendment, parts of the private sector keep dabbling in behaving like a woke parallel government. Corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs to hijack our country from outside the constitutional order.”
― Mitch McConnell

“Cultural disgust to bizarre new ideas protects low-openness people not only from psychosis, but from maladaptive memes. They may not adopt useful new ideas very quickly, but neither do they join suicide cults.”
― Geoffrey Miller, Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior

“Ideological fixation is the result of the ever-present tensions and conflicts between our normative wishes and interpretation of reality.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“Ideologies, and hence ideological clashes, antagonism, and fixations, are as old as civilization itself. During most of history, ideologies were mainly religious, whereas during modern times they have taken the form often described as "secular religions" or "religion substitutes". They have always served to legitimize socioeconomic and political orders, or have projected alternatives to them.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“As members of the same species, human beings broadly share notions and precepts of morality, of what is socially regarded as a proper conduct. But again, there is no reason to think that these notions and precepts should fully converge and cohere between different people and different communities, or even in the minds of the individuals themselves.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“The history of ideologies should teach modesty, or at least warn against fixations and biases.”
― Azar Gat, Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars

“Magnifying small offenses, mind reading by identifying subconscious thoughts even the offender are unaware of, and labeling others as aggressors are all integral to the microaggression program but possibly harmful to mental health.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

“Microaggression complaints arise from a culture of victimhood in which individuals and groups display a high sensitivity to slight, have a tendency to handle conflicts through complaints to authorities and other third parties, and seek to cultivate an image of being victims who deserve assistance.”
― Bradley Campbell, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars