Quotes About Debate

When there is freedom of speech, I've found that the majority of people really have nothing to say.

After all, if freedom of speech means anything, it means a willingness to stand and let people say things with which we disagree, and which do weary us considerably.

Better a thousandfold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech.

Free speech is meant to protect unpopular speech. Popular speech, by definition, needs no protection.

Debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust and wide-open and that...may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.

No free country has ever been without Parties, which are a natural offspring of freedom.

The freedom to think out loud on certain topics, without fear of being hounded into hiding or killed, has already been lost.

To curtail free expression strikes twice at intellectual freedom, for whoever deprives another of the right to state unpopular views necessarily deprives others of the right to listen to those views.

Evolution of democracy is not possible if we are not prepared to hear the other side.

Academic freedom is being lost by a great many people who dare to challenge Darwinism. That's a terrifying situation. That's contrary to the principles of science.

The right is absolute ... government has no authority to forbid me from owning a firearm ... the debate is not about guns. It is about freedom.

A false argument should be refuted, not named. That's the basic idea behind freedom of speech. Arguments by name-calling, rather than truth and light, can generally be presumed fraudulent.

I no longer believe in freedom of speech.

Your friend will argue with you.

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

...and the funny thing was that people who weren't entirely certain they were right always argued much louder than other people, as if the main person they were trying to convince were themselves.

Arguments are to be avoided: they are always vulgar and often convincing.

Liberals are very broadminded: they are always willing to give careful consideration to both sides of the same side

Apparently being right frustrates people who are wrong.

A civilization in which there is not a continuous controversy about important issues is on the way to totalitarianism and death

Freedom of speech can be just as deadly as the right to bear arms.

The problem of freedom in America is that of maintaining a competition of ideas, and you do not achieve that by silencing one brand of idea

Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties

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