Quotes About Debate

The source of all the conflicts in the world is in trying to convince everyone that you're always correct.

What difference does it make whether it was Isaac or Ishmael who came first? We can leave that to the Arabs and Jews to fight over their inheritance.

Si vous voulez forger un athée irréductible assommez-le de principes religieux inflexibles : ça marche à tout les coups.

The debate that has been conducted in terms of "creation versus evolution" has gotten caught up with all kinds of other debates, and this has provided a singularly unhelpful backdrop to the would-be serious discussion of other parts of the Bible.

It is an interesting observation on today's religious climate that many people now get every bit as steamed up about insisting that 'all religions are just the same' as the older dogmaticians did about insisting on particular formulations and interpretations. The dogma that all dogmas are wrong, the monolithic insistence that all monolithic systems are to be rejected, has taken hold of the popular imagination at a level far beyond rational or logical discourse.

people today find real debate about actual topics difficult, and much prefer the parody of debate which consists of giving a dog a bad name and then beating him for it, and lashing out, too, at anyone who associates with the dog you happen to be beating at the time.

Part of the problem in our contemporary debates about asylum seekers or about the Middle East is that our politicians still want to present us with the dream of progress, the steady forward advance of the golden dream of freedom; and when the tide of human misery washes up on our beaches or when people in cultures very different from our own seem not to want the kind of freedom we had in mind, it is not just socially but ideologically untidy and inconvenient.

In the long run, an open airing of discriminatory ideas, and an ensuing debate about them, may well be more effective in curbing them than censorship would be.

The only way to guarantee smart decisions, Ike believed, was to bring all the responsible parties together and have them fight it out. "I do not believe in bringing them in one at a time and therefore being more impressed by the most recent one you hear," he said later. "You must get courageous men, men of strong views and let them debate and argue with each other.

Things got said, the kinds of embarrassing things that don't go away. Tempers ran high. My paternal grandfather's teak desk required a new panel, which never quite matched the others. Intellectual debate can be very hard on furniture.

For when moral convictions are reduced to arbitrary preferences, then they can no longer be debated rationally.

Put bluntly, abortion supporters have lost the argument on the scientific level.

In a book called Why Americans Hate Politics, E. J. Dionne says, "Americans hate politics as it is now practiced because we have lost all sense of the public good."4 Without the conviction that there exists an objective good, public debate disintegrates into a cacophony of warring voices.

What bioethicists debate eventually becomes law, enforced through the courts. This is already happening in countries that have legalized assisted suicide.

You need that disagreement, we all do, so that we can realize that the world isn't smooth and even, not everyone agrees with everyone else. You need a window into another world to work out what you think of your own.

While the idea of equal time for opposing opinions makes sense in a two-party political system, it does not work for science, because science is not about opinion. It is about evidence.

Until recently the mass media presented global warming as a raging debate—twelve years after President George H. W. Bush had signed the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, and twenty-five years after the U.S. National Academy of Sciences first announced that there was no reason to doubt that global warming would occur from man's use of fossil fuels.

But the construction of a revisionist history of DDT gives the game away, because it came so long after the science was settled, far too long to argue that scientists had not come to agreement, that there was still a real scientific debate. The game here, as before, was to defend an extreme free market ideology. But in this case, they didn't just deny the facts of science. They denied the facts of history.

We've noted how the notion of balance was enshrined in the Fairness Doctrine, and it may make sense for political news in a two-party system (although not in a multiparty system). But it doesn't reflect the way science works. In an active scientific debate, there can be many sides. But once a scientific issue is closed, there's only one "side." Imagine providing "balance" to the issue of whether the Earth orbits the Sun, whether continents move,

You don't reason with intellectuals. You shoot them

The science was on Smith's side, but it didn't seem to matter to ranchers and hunters, or to state legislators. The debate wasn't about science anymore, if indeed it ever had been.

Nabe: talking to Yuki DON'T SAY YOU'LL NEVER SPEAK TO ME AGAIN YOU HARD IDIOT WE HAVEN'T EVEN GOTTON INTO A HEATED DEBATE ABOUT THE GOOD AND BAD OF PORN VIDEOS EVEN

You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.

Whenever passion prevails over reason, truth becomes a casualty.