Quotes About Debate

The year that Hitler came into power the prestigious Oxford Union, a student debating society, overwhelmingly approved a motion stating that "this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country," and within a short period similar resolutions were adopted by most of England's other colleges and universities. When

To you I'm an atheist to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition.

Whatever the field under discussion, those who engage in debate must not only believe in each other's good faith, but also in their capacity to arrive at the truth.

If we bring up religion we'll have differences; we'll have arguments; and we'll never be able to get together.

Mencius said that human nature is good. I disagree with that.

Afterward, there was some debate as to whether we'd actually "done it properly," which gives you some idea of the awesome skill and artful dexterity of my lovemaking technique.

We're not arguing, we're discussing

It would have been so nice if evangelicals could have known of the Jewish traditions of dialogue, debate, argument, questioning. Instead we got inerrancy. Inerrancy made it wrong to question the literal face-value reading of any biblical text—ranging from the Sodom and Gomorrah story to Joshua's holy war texts.

According to Roy Medvedev, Stalin's victims numbered forty million. Solzhenitsyn says the number is far greater—perhaps sixty million. The debate continues even now.

Religionists want religion's placement on the pedestal of respect preserved by any means. But religion deserves no respect. Rather, it has earned scorn, ridicule, and in-your-face opposition, as have its trappings.

When a subject declares intellectual philosophy useless, you can be sure it won't be making any intellectual defense of its position.

Science is what you get when you restrict philosophy to just materialism and empiricism and scrupulously ignore everything else, without any justification. Science invented a materialist, empiricist method to exclude every other philosophical stance. It didn't debate other philosophies, it just referred them to its method, which paradigmatically omitted them! A bit like Christians referring all other religions to the Bible, and never allowing the conversation to extend beyond its pages.

Whether this strategy was better for Indian communities than fixing the more traditional reservation system is open to debate.

There are two sides to every dialogue, but if you accept the other side's terms without demanding equal time for your own, then they control the debate and its outcome.

Zoey had several vices in her life, perhaps none more dangerous than her addiction to pointless arguments.

We walked past a mailbox shaped like a cow and saw a hand-painted sign on the front door that read THE MORRISON'S—ESTABLISHED 1962. John and I had a long debate at the door about whether or not that apostrophe belonged there.

Atheists are a great example of the Free Will they choose to deny the existence of

The only "right" answer is one that can be questioned.

Unfettered political correctness is leading us into the singularity of stupidity

A politician's goal is always to manipulate public debate. I think there are some politicians with higher goals. But all of them get corrupted by power.

When Gilchrist and Sweeney aren't debating the odds of getting Goldie Hawn into bed, they are trying to stump each other with film quotes.

Deanna Raybourn

A philosopher's main task is to compulsively filibuster

The aim of argument, or of discussion, should not be victory, but progress.