Quotes About Debate

I would never want to take TOMS or myself into an issues debate. That's not what we're about. We're about helping people.

Patrick Henry aligned himself against ratification. So did Richard Henry Lee.

I'm proud to be next to the Confederate flag. That flag is not - it is not about racism folks. It's not about hatred. It's not about slavery. It's about our heritage.

I don't care much for Hillary Clinton.

Never answer a question framed from your opponent's point of view. Always reframe the question to fit your values and your frames. This may make you uncomfortable, since normal discourse styles require you to directly answer questions posed. That is a trap. Practice changing frames.

Several of them would have protested if they could have found the right arguments.

What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?

Surely, comrades, you do not want Jones back? Once again this argument was unanswerable. Certainly the animals did not want Jones back; if the holding of debates on Sunday mornings was liable to bring him back, then the debates must stop. Boxer, who had now had time to think things over, voiced the general feeling by saying: If Comrade Napoleon says it, it must be right. And from then on he adopted the maxim, Napoleon is always right, in addition to his private motto of I will work harder.

The thing that strikes me more and more, is the extraordinary viciousness and dishonesty of political controversy in our time. I don't mean merely that controversies are acrimonious. They ought to be that when they are on serious subjects. I mean that almost nobody seems to feel that an opponent deserves a fair hearing or that the objective truth matters as long as you can score a neat debating point.

It is as though in the middle of a chess tournament one competitor should suddenly begin screaming that the other is guilty of arson or bigamy. The point that is really at issue remains untouched. Libel settles nothing...

Applied to an opponent, it is abuse, applied to someone you agree with, it is praise.

No case is really answered until it has had a fair hearing

Freedom of speech and of the Press are usually attacked by arguments which are not worth bothering about.

It is a horrible thing to have to enter into the details of inter-party polemics; it is like diving into a cesspool.

I mean that almost nobody seems to feel that an opponent deserves a fair hearing or that the objective truth matters so long as you can score a neat debating point.

Since the scientific community had largely overlooked Parsons, the OTO became sole guardians of his story. He became the Che Guevara of occultism, his few surviving writings pored over, his magickal workings the subject of intense debate.

Ce n'est pas la première fois que je remarque combien, en France particulièrement, les mots ont plus d'empire que les idées. (It's not the first time I've noticed how much more power words have than ideas, particularly in France.)

A culture's ability to understand the world and itself is critical to its survival. But today we are led into the arena of public debate by seers whose main gift is their ability to compel people to continue to watch them.

La palabrería de lo «políticamente correcto» ha hecho casi imposible entablar un debate serio acerca de la naturaleza y la educación; examinar la parte de la herencia genética, y de factores económicos y sociales, en la composición de las capacidades humanas.

Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause. George Washington, Revolutionary War General and U.S. President

Creationists make it sound like a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night. Isaac Asimov, Russian-born American author

Few things are more boring than fruitless arguments!

Argument is to me the air I breathe. Given any proposition, I cannot help believing the other side and defending it.

When I get passionate or worked up about an issue, I say things that the Conservatives and opponents and critics like to pounce on.