Quotes About Debate

It took at least three hundred years of debate before the question of the canon even began to reach closure. The decisions that were eventually made were not handed down from on high, and they did not come right away. The canon was the result of a slow and often painful process, in which lots of disagreements were aired and different points of view came to be expressed, debated, accepted, and suppressed.

Christian followers of Jesus who knew about Apollonius maintained that he was a charlatan and a fraud; in response, the pagan followers of Apollonius asserted that Jesus was the charlatan and fraud. Both groups could point to the authoritative written accounts of their leader's life to score their debating points.

I have often wondered what would have happened if Paul and Matthew had been locked up in a room together and told they could not come out until they had hammered out a consensus statement on how followers of Jesus were to deal with the Jewish law. Would they ever have emerged, or would they still be there, two skeletons locked in a death grip? If

have had a field day here.

Why allow John Boehner or Nancy Pelosi to dominate your book group when Jefferson, Lincoln, and King are in the room?

debating with the devil had never been productive for anyone.

Democracy thrived on a clash of ideas, a tolerance of viewpoints, and robust debate.

Never let your opponent speak unilaterally.

Americans believed in openness. Democracy thrived on a clash of ideas, a tolerance of viewpoints, and robust debate.

He who frames an issue, wins that issue more often than not. - unknown

For emotion is the enemy of rational argument.

When you are consumed with the rightness or wrongness of a given issue—whether it's fracking or gun control or genetically engineered food—it's easy to lose track of what the issue actually is.

emotion is the enemy of rational argument.

Everyone's entitled to their own opinion but not to their own facts.

Freakonomics is out to dazzle you with facts; The Armchair Economist is out to dazzle you with logic.

Disagreement is necessary in deliberations among mortals. As the saying goes, the more we disagree, the more chance there is that at least one of us is right.

We are verbivores, a species that lives on words, and the meaning and use of language are bound to be among the major things we ponder, share, and dispute.

The culture of science is based on the opposite belief. Its signature practices, including open debate, peer review, and double-blind methods, are designed to circumvent the sins to which scientists, being human, are vulnerable. As Richard Feynman put it, the first principle of science is "that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.

Western philosophy, then, is not an extended debate about knowledge, ethics, and reality, but a succession of conceptual metaphors. Descartes's philosophy is based on KNOWING IS SEEING, Locke's on the MIND IS A CONTAINER, Kant's on MORALITY IS A STRICT FATHER, and so on.

Quem tem familiaridade com a vida acadêmica sabe que ela gera cultos ideológicos propensos ao dogma e resistentes à crítica.

The realization of the perfect riposte three hours after the argument: hindser, stairwit, retrotort, afterism.

When Tetlock was asked at a public lecture to forecast the future of forecasting, he said, "When the audience of 2515 looks back on the audience of 2015, their level of contempt for how we go about judging political debate will be roughly comparable to the level of contempt we have for the 1692 Salem witch trials."49

to re-enter the roundtable of morality. As the psychologist Peter DeScioli points out, when you face an adversary alone, your best weapon may be an ax, but when you face an adversary in front of a throng of bystanders, your best weapon may be an argument.

If you have to silence people who disagree with you, does that mean you have no good arguments for why they're mistaken?