Quotes About Debate

Letter to a Christian Nation.

The term 'atheist,' " Kirsch continued, "should not even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a 'nonastrologer' or a 'nonalchemist.' We do not have words for people who doubt that Elvis is still alive, or for people who doubt that aliens traverse the galaxy only to molest cattle. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs.

For centuries, most of the devout had looked past vast amounts of scientific data and rational logic in defense of their faith.

It seems we do a lot of fighting over God. Everyone has a different version of the truth.

expostulated

Such insights put to rest the century-old debate on nature versus nurture: do our genes or our experiences determine who we become? That debate turns out to be pointless, based on the fallacy that our genes and our environment are independent of each other; it's like arguing over which contributes more to the area of a rectangle, the length or the width.

I'm not sure what I.Q. is anyway. Prof. Nemur said it was something that measured how intelligent you were—like a scale in the drugstore weighs pounds. But Dr. Strauss had a big argument with him and said an I.Q. didn't weigh intelligence at all. He said an I.Q. showed how much intelligence you could get, like the numbers on the outside of a measuring cup. You still had to fill the cup up with stuff.

The current controversy over God's sex doesn't strike anyone as being the least bit primitive. If God is going to be like us, then there must be sexual equipment of one kind or the other, even though it presumably doesn't get much use.

We can argue about it for a thousand years, but there's never going to be an argument powerful enough to end the argument, because every argument has a counterargument.

[Restraints on the press] in all ages, have debauched morals, depressed liberty, shackled religion, supported despotism, and deluged the scaffold with blood.

Had Windham possessed discretion in debate, or Sheridan in conduct, they might have ruled their age.

The object of oratory alone in not truth, but persuasion.

The angriest person in a controversy is the one most liable to be in the wrong.

Yet at a time when people were locked in debate over the significance of nature over nurture, Day's project did not seem quite so outlandish or immoral. As a product of his time, his gender and his rank, he possessed the power and money to pursue his quest, and he therefore believed he had every right to subvert another person to meet his ideals. He was, perhaps, more deluded than wicked

As a general rule, political talk appears to me to be of all talk the most dreary and the most profitless.

A book is like a quarrel. One word leads to another, and may erupt in blood or print, irrevocably.

If you wish to converse with me," said Voltaire, "define your terms." How many a debate would have been deflated into a paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms! This is the alpha and omega of logic, the heart and soul of it, that every important term in serious discourse shall be subjected to strictest scrutiny and definition. It is difficult, and ruthlessly tests the mind; but once done it is half of any task.

the Ann Arbor, Michigan, School Board, near where I live, had a debate as to whether the primary mission of their schools was imparting knowledge or raising self-esteem. Self-esteem won.

When you have the facts on your side, argue the facts. When you have the law on your side, argue the law. When you have neither, holler - Trial Lawyer's canard

Freedom is hammered out on the anvil of discussion, dissent, and debate. —HUBERT H. HUMPHREY

Men are apt to mistake the strength of their feeling for the strength of their argument. The heated mind resents the chill touch and relentless scrutiny of logic.

Though liberals do a great deal of talking about hearing other points of view, it sometimes shocks them to learn that there are other points of view.

Proust cookies. It was literally all he knew of Proust, though he'd once had to listen to someone's lengthy argument that Proust had either described madeleines incorrectly or been describing something else entirely.

There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.