Quotes About Debate

Once said that his political adversary "dived down deeper into the sea of knowledge and came up drier than any other man he knew.

Lincoln characterized Stephen Douglas's argument as a specious and fantastic arrangement of words, by which a man can prove a horse chestnut to be a chestnut horse.

Until the twentieth century, no one had any idea that Homer might have existed in this strange and immaterial form. It was the assumption that Homer, like other poets, wrote his poetry. Virgil, Dante and Milton were merely following in his footsteps. The only debate was over why these written poems were in places written so badly. Why had he not written them better?

demonstrates quite clearly Swift's maxim that you cannot reason someone out of a position they did not reason themselves into.

if you can say something that is provably false, and no one cares, then you can't have a real debate about anything.

Faith in the power of reason—the belief that free citizens can govern themselves wisely and fairly by resorting to logical debate on the basis of the best evidence available, instead of raw power—was and remains the central premise of American democracy. This premise is now under assault.

Don't try to trick the prospect. Advertising is not a debate. It's a seduction. The

The most courageous act in politics is to try to understand your opponent.

No, but your idea of what betters human life might differ from someone else's.' For

I talk to myself," he had once explained to his minder. "I have conversations with myself. I debate with myself." He remembered smiling. "Sometimes I even win the arguments.

there are many situations in which we lose something of our humanity by militarizing discussion and debate;

Why do we argue? Life's so fragile, a successful virus clinging to a speck of mud, suspended in endless nothing.

you don't get far in political discourse with counterfactual arguments that "it would have been even worse.

We are allowed to question people about their politics or ethics and expect them to defend their beliefs, or at least hold their own in any other important matter by recourse to evidence, yet somehow on the massive subject of God and how he might have us behave, all rational discussion must stop the moment we hear 'I believe'.

They may attack me with an army of six hundred syllogisms; and if I do not recant, they will proclaim me a heretic.

My father used to say, "Don't raise your voice. Improve your argument."

Don't raise your voice, improve your argument." [ Address at the Nelson Mandela Foundation in Houghton, Johannesburg, South Africa , 23 November 2004]

My father always used to say, "Don't raise your voice. Improve your argument." Good sense does not always lie with the loudest shouters, nor can we say that a large, unruly crowd is always the best arbiter of what is right.

For the life of me, I don't understand what honest motive there is in putting this in front of this body to philosophically debate marriage on a constitutional amendment that is not going to happen, and which is enormously divisive in all of our communities.

Right down to the seventeenth century, Christian debate about faith and the world involved a debate between two Greek ghosts, Plato and Aristotle, who had never heard the name of Jesus Christ.

We've been involved in public policy debates long enough to know that when someone is losing an argument based on the facts, they try to change the subject. Thus liberals' hysterical reaction to the rising public opposition to their hostile government reboot of the American health care system. Thus Democrats' hostile attacks on the citizens who overwhelmed congressional town hall meetings over the August recess. It was "un-American.

we shall never again try to convince a fool by reason, for it is both useless and dangerous.

Certainly the most significant of [the political, social and ideological currents playing a role in the development of philosophical texts in Arabic] was the development of Islamic theology and the intense debate among the various groups and individuals about its eventual orientation.

Don't argue with people who write with digital ink and pay by the kilowatt-hour.