Quotes About Debate

The status quo - Obamacare - is not acceptable.

My favorite moment of the 2012 election was the debate question where they asked Romney and Obama what they would do to stem gun violence, and Romney's answer was you should marry someone.

The exaltation of human reason and its capabilities, a commitment to rigorous and rational debate, a promotion of intellectual inquiry and scholarly exchange--all sponsored by the Church--provided the framework for the Scientific Revolution.

Concerns about the size and role of government are what seem to leave reformers stammering and speechless in town-hall meetings. The right wants to have a debate over fundamental principles elected Democrats seem incapable of giving it to them.

Because so much disagreement remains hidden, our beliefs are not properly shaped by healthy scrutiny and debate. The absence of such argument also leads us to exaggerate the extent to which other people believe the way we do.

If we conceive of free speech as promoting the search for truth—as the metaphor of "the marketplace of ideas" suggests—we should be troubled whether that search is hindered by public officials or private citizens. The same is true of democratic justifications for free speech. If the point of free speech is to facilitate the open debate that is essential for self-rule, any measure that impairs that debate should give us pause, regardless of its source.

Freedom and order are not incompatible... truth is strength... free discussion is the very life of truth.

There is no greater mistake than the hasty conclusion that opinions are worthless because they are badly argued.

Never into dispute or argument with another. I never yet saw an instance of one of two disputants convincing the other by argument. I have seen many on their getting warm, becoming rude and shooting one another.

Difference of opinion is helpful in religion.

Never enter into dispute or argument with another. I never yet saw an instance of one of two disputants convincing the other by argument. I have seen many on their getting warm, becoming rude and shooting one another.

The thinkers and works of the past are studied here not as dated museum pieces or objects of antiquarian curiosity; they are confronted as powerful voices that challenge us to join in searching debates. The point is not to learn about these thinkers and texts, but from them.

if college graduates can no longer be counted on to lead reasoned debate and discussion in American life, and to know the difference between knowledge and feeling, then we're indeed in the kind of deep trouble no expert can fix.

We are supposed to "agree to disagree," a phrase now used indiscriminately as little more than a conversational fire extinguisher. And if we insist that not everything is a matter of opinion, that some things are right and others are wrong … well, then we're just being jerks, apparently. It

Public debate over almost everything devolves into trench warfare, in which the most important goal is to establish that the other person is wrong.

Principled, informed arguments are a sign of intellectual health and vitality in a democracy.

The issue is not indifference to established knowledge; it's the emergence of a positive hostility to such knowledge. This is new in American culture, and it represents the aggressive replacement of expert views or established knowledge with the insistence that every opinion on any matter is as good as every other. This is a remarkable change in our public discourse. This

What is Logicke but the highe waie to wrangling, contayning in it a world of bibble babble. Need we anie of your Greek, Latine, Hebrue, or anie such gibbrage, when we have the word of God in English?

What is Logicke but the highe waie to wrangling, contayning in it a world of bible babble. Need we anie of your Greek, Latine, Hebrue, or anie such gibbrage, when we have the word of God in English?

Arguing with one who will not accept facts is like administering medicine to the dead.

To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.

It is always the interest of a far greater number of people in a nation to have things right, than to let them remain wrong; and when public matters are open to debate, and the public judgment free, it will not decide wrong, unless it decides to hastily.

There is nothing so absurd which some philosophers have not maintained.

As for gun control advocates, I have no hope whatever that any facts whatever will make the slightest dent in their thinking - or lack of thinking.