Quotes About Debate

WRITER So, go on then, get all smart about it—can you deny what I'm saying? Huh? Jesus was not some . . . Indonesian guy! He just wasn't. ACTOR I'm not Indonesian! Jesus Christ!

An opinion is not a momentary thing but a process of thinking, shaped by the continuous acquisition of knowledge and the activity of questioning, discussion, and debate.

Tocqueville remarks on this in Democracy in America. "An American," he wrote, "cannot converse, but he can discuss, and his talk falls into a dissertation.

set a cat among the philosophical pigeons.

A good leader can engage in a debate frankly and thoroughly, knowing that at the end he and the other side must be closer, and thus emerge stronger. You don't have that idea when you are arrogant, superficial, and uninformed.

One should never forget the main aim in a debate, inside and outside the organisations, in political rallies, in Parliament and other government structures, is that we should emerge from that debate, however sharp our differences might have been, stronger, closer and more united and confident that ever before.

So I'd be quite happy to have a three-hour Lincoln-Douglas-style debate with Barack Obama. I'd let him use a teleprompter. I'll just rely on knowledge. We'll do fine.

Is it Locke who says that it is one thing to show a man he is in error and another to convince him of the truth? You have shown me my error. Pray reveal the whole truth.

Outsiders don't understand the enfeebling self-consciousness of political debate on the middle-class liberal-left: they can't imagine the thoughts strangled and tongues bitten to avoid giving the smallest offence to audiences overanxious to find it.

Rushdie Affair became the Dreyfus Affair of our age because it revealed how, when faced the threat of violence, ordinary political categories collapse.

There's no greater insult in science than to say that an argument is 'not even wrong', that it is invulnerable to disproof.

The fool is scandalized and laughs when he notices that philosophers contradict each other. It is difficult to make the fool understand that philosophy is precisely that: the art of contradicting each other without canceling each other out.

The leftist, like the polemicist of yesteryear, believes he refutes an opinion by accusing the holder of that opinion of immorality.

Verdad es aquello que cualquier imbécil refuta.

Men disagree less because they think differently than because they do not think.

The reactionary's objection is not discussed; it is disdained.

No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical.

We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.

I am not getting into the rarebit versus rabbit argument. Whatever you call it, it is still cheese on toast.

Preserving freedom of speech maximizes the chance of truth emerging from its collision with error and half-truth.

Even if I believe my opinion to be true, and am highly confident about its truth, unless it is 'fully, frequently and fearlessly' discussed, I will end up holding it as a dead dogma, a formulaic and unthinking response.

Users of slippery slope arguments should take skiing lessons—you really can choose to stop.

Free speech does indeed cause hurt—but there is nothing wrong in this. Knowledge advances through the destruction of bad ideas. Mockery

Free speech is one of the core values in a democracy and it should be championed with a vengeance.