Quotes About Debates

A major question was to what extent should we permit real democracy? Madison discussed this pretty seriously, not so much in the Federalist Papers—which were kind of propaganda—but in the debates of the Constitutional Convention, which are the most interesting place to look. If you read the debates, Madison said the major concern of the society—any decent society—has to be to "protect the minority of the opulent against the majority." His phrase.

how much time and energy is devoted, and not to the issues that the candidates are raising, but simply to their relative strengths and weaknesses vis-à-vis their electability: the personalities, the horse race, not the issues and so forth.

Men's arguments often prove nothing but their wishes.

Take our politicians: they're a bunch of yo-yos. The presidency is now a cross between a popularity contest and a high school debate, with an encyclopedia of clichés as the first prize.

Well, I think the way to go is civil unions. But I do think when you talk about the Republican Party and the debates that are going on within the Republican Party on a number of issues, what I'm hoping is that they will get to a point where they will work with us on moving forward with this economy.

Why consider debates in the English House of Commons in 1628 along with documents on American developments in the late eighteenth century? The juxtaposition is not capricious, because the Commons during this period generated many of the ideas that were later embodied in the government of the United States.

The threshold by the Commission on Presidential Debates. In the words of the League of Women Voters, they are a fraud being perpetrated on the American public.

No one can argue any longer about the rights of women. It's like arguing about earthquakes.

There's a nastiness to conversations about U.S. education reform, which are characterized by the kind of stark taking-of-sides that's usually reserved for debates over guns or abortion rights.

I'm all for philosophical debates about race, but if you look at history, you see that the status quo has power when it's unchallenged. So these conversations about inequality are crucial.

But it is also true that things that begin in Kansas—the Civil War, Prohibition, Populism, Pizza Hut—have a historical tendency to go national. Maybe Kansas, instead of being a laughingstock, is actually in the vanguard. Maybe what has happened there points the way in which all our public policy debates are heading. Maybe someday soon the political choices of Americans everywhere will be whittled down to the two factions of the Republican Party.

the only way to resolve these debates in terms of policy choices is to move them from the realm of research to the arena of politics and democratic choice. If democracy is to mean anything at all, then experts and laypeople have to solve complicated problems together.

Just as people gather on the road to see a fistfight, India gathers at night to watch TV debates.

Even in the debates, so repellent was slavery to northerners—and so embarrassing to southerners—that when the subject came up, the delegates often danced around it, employing euphemisms, such as "this unique species of property" or "this unhappy class," as stand-ins for the more disagreeable "slaves." Thus, the words "slave" and "slavery" never appeared in the original Constitution, nor would they until ninety-one years later when the thirteenth amendment abolished the practice

the opening lines of 'Sonnet 93' in 1780, which set the direction of Shakespeare biography–and debates over authorship–on a new and irreversible course.

Arguments are too much like disputes.

I agree that the two-party system stomps on any kind of competition. A great first step is to open the presidential debates to all qualified candidates, including the Libertarians. If that happens, the Libertarian party will experience unprecedented growth.

For as long as I can remember, we've been having debates about the foreign policy disasters and seemingly unsolvable problems around the world. Dinner conversations are replayed over generations - nothing seems to get better, and in some aspects, it seems dramatically worse, and that is especially true for women.

The arts are an even better barometer of what is happening in our world than the stock market or the debates in congress.

When Amazon emerged, people had these debates about whether people would put their credit cards online.

Discussions about technology—its capacity, what it can and cannot do, what it should and should not do—are the reverse side of the coin to debates on the capacity, ability, and moral entitlements of humans. Attempts

The arts are an even better barometer of what is happening in our world than the stock market or the debates in congress.

Children have fewer rights than almost any other group and fewer institutions protecting these rights. Consequently, their voices and needs are almost completely absent from the debates, policies, and legislative practices that are constructed in terms of their needs.

Presidential campaigns are on the verge of turning into media contests between master operators of the Internet. What once had been substantive debates about the content of governance will reduce candidates to being spokesmen for a marketing effort pursued by methods whose intrusiveness would have been considered only a generation ago the stuff of science fiction. The