Quotes About Dialogue

Again and again the schools which form the twentieth century's elites throughout the West refer to their Socratic heritage. The implication is that doubt is constantly raised in their search for truth. In reality the way they teach is the opposite of a Socratic dialogue. In the Athenian's case every answer raised a question. With the contemporary elites every question produces an answer. Socrates would have thrown the modern elites out of his academy.

Discussion requires the participation of two people whose willingness to listen is as great as their desire to be heard.

Once again, the civil society chanting "Todos somos Marcos" ("We are all Marcos") filled the capital's ZOcalo plaza, and support for the Mayan rebels ran so high that the Mexican congress was forced to pass legislation ordering Zedillo to open a dialogue with the Zapatistas.

Peter Gomes, Harvey Cox, Diana Eck and Dorothy Austin.

If there are any persons who contest a received opinion, or who will do so if law or opinion will let them, let us thank them for it, open our minds to listen to them, and rejoice that there is some one to do for us what we otherwise ought, if we have any regard for either the certainty or the vitality of our convictions, to do with much greater labor for ourselves.

If there are any persons who contest a received opinion, or who will do so if law or opinion will let them, let us thank them for it, open our minds to listen to them, and rejoice that there is some one to do for us what we otherwise ought, if we have any regard for either the certainty or the vitality of our convictions, to do with much greater labour for ourselves.

When there are persons to be found, who form an exception to the apparent unanimity of the world on any subject, even if the world is in the right, it is always probable that dissentients have something worth hearing to say for themselves, and that truth would lose something by their silence.

Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. That is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into real contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them.

only through diversity of opinion is there, in the existing state of human intellect, a chance of fair play to all sides of the truth.

NOT THE VIOLENT CONFLICT BETWEEN PARTS OF THE TRUTH, BUT THE QUIET SUPPRESSION OF HALF OF IT, IS THE FORMIDABLE EVIL; THERE IS ALWAYS HOPE WHEN PEOPLE ARE FORCED TO LISTEN TO BOTH SIDES; it is when they attend only to one that errors harden into prejudices, and truth itself ceases to have the effect of truth, by being exaggerated into falsehood.

However unwillingly a person who has a strong opinion may admit the possibility that his opinion may be false, he ought to be moved by the consideration that, however true it may be, if it is not fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed, it will be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth.

Being a true scholar means considering all opinions NOT just the ones we agree with.

Pilgrim, hold it, I said you, Valance, you pick it up

Very few of the so-called liberals are open-minded.... They shout you down and won't let you speak if you disagree with them.

Listen if you want to be heard

You don't seriously suggest that thet're talking when they make that rattling noise.

There they sit, with everyone thinking no more of them than they might of a pretty odd lot of cabbages, yet half the time they're pattering and clattering away at one another. Why? What is it they patter about? That's what I want to know.' I

There's a whole lot of people don't seem to understand that you have to talk to a man in his own language before he'll take you seriously.

I'm very much aware in the writing of dialogue, or even in the narrative too, of a rhythm. There has to be a rhythm with it … Interviewers have said, you like jazz, don't you? Because we can hear it in your writing. And I thought that was a compliment.

No one has lived so close to his skeleton as I have lived to mine: from which results an endless dialogue and certain truths which I manage neither to accept nor to reject.

At bottom, for me, the act of writing is a sort of dialogue with God. I say with God, but I am not a believer, although I cannot say that I am an unbeliever either. But for me, this meeting with God is in the act of writing. A solitude which meets another, a solitude in front of another solitude. 'God' being more alone than oneself. Such a shame that, to reach God, there is no bypassing faith.

Când ajungi la limita monologului, la marginile singur?t??ii, îl inventezi - în lipsa altui interlocutor - pe Dumnezeu, pretext suprem pentru dialog.

Conversation is fruitful only between minds given to consolidating their perplexities.

What is the point of what we say? Is there any meaning to this series of propositions which constitutes our talk? And do these propositions, taken one by one, have any object? We can talk only if we set aside this question, or if we raise it as infrequently as possible.