Quotes About Debate

The power of demonstrating your idea is that your opponents do not get defensive, and are therefore more open to persuasion. Making them literally and physically feel your meaning is infinitely more powerful than argument.

Fight as if you are right, listen as if you are wrong.

The University of Michigan's Karl Weick advises, "Fight as if you are right; listen as if you are wrong.

There was so much heat and so little light in the debate that I thought a cooling-off period would be beneficial. And so I punted the contract decision to my successor. To my great dismay, I would end up receiving my own punt.

Holy wars are not fought over them because verbalized statements about reality are never presumed to be reality itself.

Science provides us with some of the most elegant, stimulating puzzles that life has to offer. It throws some of the most provocative ideas into our arenas of moral debate. Occasionally, it improves our lives. I love science, and it pains me to think that so many are terrified of the subject or feel that choosing science means that you cannot also choose compassion, or the arts, or be awed by nature. Science is not meant to cure us of mystery, but to reinvent and reinvigorate it.

People who are aware that they are making contestable assumptions are much more likely to recognize that reasonable people of goodwill can, in fact, disagree—even about matters of profound human and moral significance.

Let us leave in suspension such debates about the economic costs of the War and look at another kind of cost, a kind more subtle, pervasive, and continuing, a kind that conditions in a thousand ways the temper of American life today. This cost is psychological, and it is, of course, different for the winner and the loser.

Our discussions ran late into the night

Today, people still challenge me on the idea of a house not being an asset.

Heretics are wicked, but they're mighty int'resting.

Kevin, yours won so many arguments that she was made a teacher

Whether vampires should have been declared 'alive' and full citizens of the United States of America was one of the big debates ranking right up there with gun rights and abortion. In a way all of them are about life and death—defining what life is, and what it isn't, and how far we'll go to protect, or take, it.

I was debating on whether to carry a second gun. A fashion accessory nearer and dearer to my heart than any piece of clothing.

Never argue when you're winning. (Crimson Death)

So that whether the pain of a wound in the groin (cæteris paribus) is greater than the pain of a wound in the knee—or Whether the pain of a wound in the knee is not greater than the pain of a wound in the groin—are points which to this day remain unsettled.

First, Whenever a man talks loudly against religion, always suspect that it is not his reason, but his passions, which have got the better of his creed.

You opened a debate. You can't close if just because it is not going your way. -David Petrakis

It is still open to question whether psychology is a natural science, or whether it can be regarded as a science at all.

Those who say that the study of science makes a man an atheist, must be rather silly people.

No great advance has ever been made in science, politics, or religion, without controversy.

Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today.

The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.

Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.