Quotes About Debate

I cannot keep my mouth shut, even when it is dangerous to have it open. If, for example, I hear somebody, even an important and easily irascible Somebody, say that Montaigne was born around the year 1600, I simply have to open my mouth and declare: "You are mistaken, sir, Montaigne was born in the year 1533.

It is no less astonishing how many subjects—historical, philological, biological, sociological, economic—people regard as politics

I think Donald Trump is a complete and utter buffoon and a cancer to our society.

Everything about art has become problematic; its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist.

Paul Krugman is a danger to society!

In order to have a society in which public issues can be openly and vigorously debated, it is not necessary to allow the brutalization of innocent victims.

Only people who look dull ever get into the House of Commons, and only people who are dull ever succeed there.

The question of the family now divides our society so deeply that the opposing sides cannot even agree on a definition of the institution they are arguing about.

A genuinely political society, in which discussion and debate are an essential technique, is a society full of risks.

This isn't a little debate society. That's high school stuff.

A mature society understands that at the heart of democracy is argument.

I won't yield to anyone about guns in our society. I know enough about it.

Sports, politics, and religion are the three passions of the badly educated.

It must be wonderful sport to contradict each other.

In m second year I attended a public debate on a theme that interested me, though not by its novelty: does life mainly evolve through small gradual changes, or through big catastrophic ones? In those days that theme was supposed to be religious as well as scientific, so the principle speakers swerved from fanatical solemnity to facetious jocularity, and changed the ground of their argument whenever it gave them the slightest advantage over their opponents.

The introduction of the word 'intuition' by a moral philosopher is always a signal that something has gone badly wrong with an argument.

Contemporary moral argument is rationally interminable, because all moral, indeed all evaluative, argument is and always must be rationally interminable. Contemporary moral disagreements of a certain kind cannot be resolved, because no moral disagreements of that kind in any age, past, present or future, can be resolved.

Random quotes don't constitute an argument.

Does there truly exist an insuperable contradiction between religion and science? Can religion be superseded by science?

Nothing is more dead and dated than the book which once caused controversy.

To argue:...only causes us to fall into the pit of Because, and there to perish with the dogs of Reason.

She did not have strong views on politics. She did not like the confrontational nature of much political discussion; why could people not argue politely, she wondered, taking into account the views of others and accepting that people might differ with one another in perfectly good faith?

people decided what they thought and would not be moved, not even by the most patient, the most rational argument.

Do not think that in any case where there are two competing arguments one of them has to be right: both can be wrong.