Quotes About Debate

The obscene laws that constitute apartheid are not crazed edicts issued by a dictator, nor the whims of a megalomanic monster, nor the one-man decisions of a fanatical ideologue. They are the result of polite caucus discussions by hundreds of delegates in sober suits, after full debate in party congresses. They are passed after three solemn readings in a parliament that opens every day's proceedings with a prayer to Jesus Christ. There is a special horror in that fact.

We should worry again about the connection between play-starved education and eroded mechanisms for political debate, if worry can lead beyond deadlocks. Too often, academic essays pursue analysis and critique but stop short of speculation about remedies, as if intellectual work excluded an element of creativity. In fact, essays that remain risk-averse miss the potential of the genre to "assay," or try out, ideas.

Scholars may contribute their knowledge or insight to public debate on important issues. They may contribute it in a form that is understandable to a policymaker, or even to the public, consistently with their duty of rigorous intellectual honesty. Scholars should not feel constrained to publish only turgid prose in obscure journals. They should not leave the public debate to those who feel no scruples whatever to conform their claims to the evidence.

Bret Weinstein

Las redes se han convertido en el medio ideal para instaurar nuevos dogmas y aplastar al oponente justo cuando más convendría escucharlo.

Always at the hands of people who range from the semi-informed to the uninformed.

It is a stimulating scientific riposte to the people claiming that biological differences between the sexes do not exist. As Pinker said, 'Things are not looking good for the theory that boys and girls are born identical except for their genitalia, with all other differences coming from the way society treats them.'2 Except that less than two decades later they are. The facts are certainly on Pinker's side, but the noisier voices are not.

And as the history of the church revealed in Acts shows, their central debate was over whether or not the Gentiles had to include their children in the New Covenant by means of circumcision—their debate was not whether the Jewish Christians had to start excluding their children.

Some men carry their sin in front of them like a shield, and others drag it behind them, like a rope. With some men, we see the consequences of the sin right away. With others, we don't see it for a good seventy-five years, and even then there is debate among the learned.

Sandel therefore concludes that a just society is not one that seeks to adjudicate disputes between individuals from a morally neutral perspective, but one that facilitates debate about what the appropriate moral perspective ought to be. As Sandel acknowledges, this is likely to be a messy affair and always a work in progress, but he does not see any way around it.

Conversation means being able to disagree and still continue the discussion

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

It is senseless to argue with someone whose sole purpose in life is to not be convinced of anything.

The tension between 'yes' and no', between 'I can' and 'I cannot,' makes us feel that, in so many instances, human life is an interminable debate with one's self.

Anyone who can look me in the eye and say they prefer the story of Moses or Jesus or Mohammed to the life of Socrates is intellectually defective.

The art of arguing is the art of living. We argue because we must, because life emends it, because, in the end, life itself is but an argument.

Most arguments are useless.

We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is

There is giant untapped potential in disagreement, especially if the disagreement is between two or more thoughtful people

My view of life is, that it's next to impossible to convince anybody of anything.

History is the art of making an argument about the past by telling a story accountable to evidence. In the writing of history, a story without an argument fades into antiquarianism; an argument without a story risks pedantry. Writing history requires empathy, inquiry, and debate. It requires forswearing condescension, cant, and nostalgia. The past isn't quaint. Much of it, in fact, is bleak.

Another debate merged politics and technology. Could the nation's new democratic traditions survive in the

The debate also marked the limits of the Progressive vision: both sides in this debate availed themselves, at one time or another, of the rhetoric of white supremacy. Eight million people of color in the Pacific and the Caribbean, from the Philippines to Puerto Rico, were now part of the United States, a nation that already, in practice, denied the right to vote to millions of its own people because of the color of their skin.

The Constitution threatens to be a subject of infinite sects, like the Bible." And, as with many sects, those politicians who most strenuously staked their arguments on the Constitution often appeared the least acquainted with it.