Quotes About Debate

If we aren't going to be afraid of conflict, we have to see it as thinking.

I still consider myself a liberal in the Enlightenment sense of the word. But I have to admit that being a liberal these days is confusing.

Political rhetoric leads only to confusion.

Congress: Bingo with billions.

A competition of the best ideas - that should be what Congress is about.

I still find it hard to understand that anyone could argue that you can't have machines that exhibit consciousness.

Honestly, I don't think that the policies and issues surrounding guns will be easily figured out in our country, but we need to take a close look, and we need to have a conversation around those issues.

Nothing is clear cut in the debate surrounding high-speed rail, but from its successes elsewhere we can be confident that it pays a great dividend to the society it serves.

The surveillance of ordinary people is far greater than I would have imagined and far greater than the American public has been able to debate.

I've always been very suspicious of the left-right dimension in politics.

The level of discourse in this country is falling to a depth that cannot be sustained.

It would be awesome to be so impressive that we could sway people to our way of thinking just by declaiming our thoughts, but probably most of us lack such gravitas. Luckily, there's something even better: evidence, logic, and argument.

Logic is like the sword - those who appeal to it, shall perish by it.

News writing and sports writing have become synonymous. And it started with, you know, free agency, and now it's in the concussion debate.

We have, on the whole, more liberty and less equality than Russia has. Russia has less liberty and more equality. Whether democracy should be defined primarily in terms of liberty or equality is a source of unending debate.

I had become aware, as early as my college days, that no opinion, however absurd and incredible can be imagined, that has not been held by one of the philosophers.

If philosophers were always in agreement about the meaning of words, almost all their disputes would evaporate.

debate continues. In my hem or in my hand? I

Indeed, in many cases, discussion can be carried on indefinitely without arriving at any solution, which is the reason why almost all modern philosophy is built up on quibbles and badly-framed questions. Far from clearing up these questions, as it is commonly supposed to do, discussion usually only entangles or obscures them still further [...]

Du reste, il est à remarquer que les philosophes disent souvent des choses beaucoup plus justes quand ils argumentent contre d'autres philosophes que quand ils en viennent à exposer leurs propres vues, et chacun voyant généralement assez bien les défauts des autres, ils se détruisent en quelque sorte mutuellement

Probably no man will ever corral truth, but Protagoras came closer to it than Plato.

Because an argument is used hypocritically, it does not necessarily follow that it is untrue.

The arguments themselves did not appear to me to be any better simply because they were better expressed; eloquence did not make them true." St. Augustine page 85

Politics, it seems to me, for years, or all too long, has been concerned with right or left instead of right or wrong.