Quotes About Debate

After much inner debate, I can safely proclaim that Mungo Jerry's 'In the Summertime' may, in fact, be the best song ever recorded.

Pressure for the most part comes from this overarching concern that if I head into the election season without sufficient resources, then any outside group, any individual, any super PAC may choose to come in to my district and overwhelm it and take over the airwaves and control the debate.

When a thing is said to be not worth refuting you may be sure that either it is flagrantly stupid - in which case all comment is superfluous - or it is something formidable, the very crux of the problem.

Giving yourself the privilege of destroying other positions while parking your own position in an unidentifiable location is a form of linguistic terrorism.

The resulting inability or even desire to reason and think through an idea logically is demonstrated by one-liners such as "I'm not into 'isms.

In the postmodernist mentality the purpose of dialogue or debate is not for truth but only for feeling, and as passion has taken over, facts are given no legitimacy. The result is hate-filled shouting matches.

Whatever worldview we espouse, dialogue and debate should take place with civility and courteous listening. But our times make that ideal so elusive. Holding a supposedly noble belief and reducing it to ignoble means of propagation makes the one who holds that belief suspect.

The goal in most conflicts is to destroy your opponent. The goal in apologetics is to win your opponent.

If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one.

The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy

When people disagreed with him, he urged them to be objective.

The delegates from the southern states insisted that slaves were property, like horses and sheep, and therefore should not be counted as "Inhabitants." Franklin countered this claim with an edgy joke, observing that slaves, the last time he looked, did not behave like sheep: "Sheep will never make any insurrections.

Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it.

Only when people genuinely disagree does tolerance become necessary. Claiming that someone is wrong for holding a different viewpoint, then, isn't itself intolerant; the attitude that accompanies the claim may, however, be intolerant.

Where there is passion there is argument.

Socrates identified the practice of philosophy with personal discussion and questioning, refusing to write anything.

Socrates never raises the question whether there is such a thing as wisdom or expertise.

Socrates is ambitiously searching for understanding of difficult concepts like virtue and courage. But his approach is always to question others, starting only from shared premisses. This kind of ad hominem arguing relies only on what the opponent accepts and what it produces, time after time, are conclusions as to what virtue, courage, friendship and so on are not.

centrality to the ancient tradition of argument, and also of practical engagement with issues important to our lives.

The current anticrime debate takes place within a reified mathematical realm - a strategy reminiscent of Malthus's notion of the geometrical increase in population and the arithmetical increase in food sources, thus the inevitability of poverty and the means of suppressing it: war, disease, famine, and natural disasters.

The story of the Syro-Phoenician makes women's contribution to one of the most crucial traditions in early Christian beginnings historically available. Through such an analysis, the Syro-Phoenician can become visible again as one of the apostolic foremothers of Gentile Christians. By moving her into the center of the debate about the mission to the Gentiles, the historical centrality of Paul in this debate becomes relativized.

We must protect the right of our opponents to speak because we must hear what they have to say.

Thus the essence of freedom of opinion is not in mere toleration as such, but in the debate which toleration provides: it is not in the venting of opinion, but in the confrontation of opinion.

In argument, truth always prevails finally in politics, falsehood always.