Quotes About Debate

Testimony is like an arrow shot from a long-bow; its force depends on the strength of the hand that draws it. But argument is like an arrow from a cross-bow, which has equal force if drawn by a child or a man.

When you have nothing to say, say nothing; a weak defense strengthens your opponent, and silence is less injurious than a bad reply.

We own almost all our knowledge not to those who have agreed but to those who have differed.

People here argue about religion interminably, but it appears that they are competing at the same time to see who can be the least devout.

Rather a tough customer in argyment.

in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted

To put it in more shocking terms, it doesn't matter if the skeptics are right or not, because the assumptions on which the debate is based are already enough to doom us to a dystopian future.

If all the economists in this country were laid end to end, they would never reach a conclusion.

And the poet out-argues Nature.

Yet the real issue is not the danger of religion per se, but of dogmatic thinking.

or refuting, with his guidance, a famous refutation of the existence of time, will be worth it.

The sooner we all learn to make a decision between disapproval and censorship, the better off society will be....Censorship cannot get at the real evil, and it is an evil in itself.

Imagine the time, a dozen generations from now, when wave mechanics powers every machine and everyone takes it for granted. Do you really want them thinking that it fell from the sky, fully formed, when the truth is that they owe their good fortune to the most powerful engine of change in history: people arguing about science.

Do not argue with an idiot. He will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience.

The unbeliever attempts to enlist logic, science, and morality in his debate against the truth of Christianity. Van Til's apologetic answers these attempts by arguing that only the truth of Christianity can rescue the meaningfulness and cogency of logic, science, and morality.

Of course, if you accept the materialist belief that memories can be created only if the brain is functioning, then that will be your conclusion. But that's exactly the point in question: whether mental functions like perception and memory can occur without the brain.

It was an example of what he thought of as the Law of Controversy: Passion was inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.

the Law of Controversy: Passion was inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.

Just as many questions might be started for debate among people sitting up at night as to the kind of thing that sunshine is, and then the simple appearing of it in all its beauty would render any verbal description superfluous, so every calculation that tries to arrive conjecturally at the future state will be reduced to nothingness by the object of our hopes, when it comes upon us.

Plato's Socrates is not persuasive at all. He wins every argument, but never manages to win over an opponent. He has to fight every inch of the way for any assent he gets, and gets it, so to speak, at the point of a dagger.

Sentiment has never been vanquished in its eternal conflict with reason

While the tamale dates to the foundation of civilizations in Meso-America, food historians will forever debate the origins of chili. Only

Dictatorship means shut up, democracy means keep talking!

Since Logic derives from postulates, it never has, and never will, change a postulate. And a religious belief is a system of postulates ... so how can a man fight a native superstition with logic? Or anything else ...?