Quotes About Debate

You cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into in the first place.

Argument, as usually managed, is the worst sort of conversation

Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired.

Teaching students the evidence for and against Darwinism is not the same as teaching intelligent design. The U.S. Congress has officially endorsed teaching students 'the full range of scientific views' about Darwinian evolution.

The trouble with free speech is that it insists on living up to its name.

To refute him is to become contaminated with unreality.

Pero este tipo de argumentos no tuvo mucho peso cuando el viernes 29 de septiembre del 2006 el Senado de Estados Unidos autorizó la construcción de un muro de casi 700 millas en la frontera con México. Ni siquiera hubo fuerte oposición. Ochenta senadores votaron a favor (incluyendo a Barack Obama y John McCain) y sólo diecinueve se opusieron.

Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas.

If you feel that strongly about something, you have an obligation to try and change my mind.

Although the Mongols dominated Russia for close to two and a half centuries, from 1240 to roughly 1480, there is still no consensus among scholars about the extent to which they influenced the course of Russian

to think that before Pasteur's discovery of microbes, doctors fought duels over the merits of balsam of Peru versus tar oil for wound infection. Ignorance was just as dynamic as knowledge, and it grew in the same proportion. Still, each generation of physicians imagined that ignorance was the special provenance of their elders.

The whole history of the debate about life beyond Earth is an argument between optimists and pessimists. It's a debate that began with the opposition between Aristotle and Epicurus, extended through the 1800s to Flammarion versus Whewell, and took its modern turn with the Drake equation, through which the battle between pessimism and optimism became quantitative.

Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other side is mostly not listening, than with telling the guys on your side how they ought to sound when they're arguing.

Dissenting opinions are useful, even when they are wrong.

Argue like you're right and listen like you're wrong. ?

Minority viewpoints are important, not because they tend to prevail but because they stimulate divergent attention and thought, " finds Berkeley psychologist Charlan Nemeth, one of the world's leading experts on group decisions. "As a result, even when they are wrong they contribute to the detection of novel solutions and decisions that, on balance, are qualitatively better". Dissenting opinions are useful even when they're wrong.

The more reasons we put on the table, the easier it is for people to discard the shakiest one. Once they reject one of our justifications, they can easily dismiss our entire case. That happened regularly to the average negotiators: they brought too many different weapons to battle. They lost ground not because of the strength of their most compelling point, but because of the weakness of their least compelling one.

I think church and state should remain entirely separate at all costs, and that the decision of religious marriage should be of each faith to debate and decide free of political influence.

Nineteen teeth from twelve sixth-century plague pits in Aschheim near Munich provided the source of the Code of Justinian. In among the ancient human DNA are the remnants of other species that loiter around our bodies. A 2013 study ground out DNA from those teeth and found without doubt the same Yersinia pestis we see today. This had settled a long running debate about whether that great plague was in fact bubonic.

The historical background of this dispute could be the 5th c. bce debate over whether or not the Transjordanians, headed by Tobiah, were a part of the community centered in Jerusalem (Neh. 2.10, 19, 20; 13.1–9). Alternately, the Transjordan community may represent all those who live outside of Israel, and the story aims to teach that in order for them to retain their identity and ties with Israel they must not conduct sacrificial practices elsewhere,

The first principle of a free society is an untrammeled flow of words in an open forum.

Freedom rings where opinions clash.

The sound of tireless voices is the price we pay for the right to hear the music of our own opinions.

A politician is a statesman who approaches every question with an open mouth.