Quotes About Public discourse

A flourishing, morally credible media is a vital component in the maintenance of genuinely public talk, argument about common good.

The whole, 'Is the internet a good thing or a bad thing'? We're done with that. It's just a thing. How to maximise its civic value, its public good - that's the really big challenge.

Governments throughout the English-speaking sphere are creating and then ratcheting the torque on "hate-speech" laws with frightening eagerness.

Abortion is not an issue with the American people. It is a figment of your imagination if you think that this is an issue that is talked about a lot.

President Donald Trump has now sued the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN over opinion pieces that they've published - and really, he should stop.

Whether you are liberal or conservative, people seem to know the talking points for whatever the issue of the day is. Very rarely does it seem like these are opinions that people are coming up with themselves; it's like they watched the right cable news channel, and now they know what they are supposed to think, and they repeat that.

It's interesting to me that apparently distasteful comments from the Right against weak targets tend to draw a lot less media fire than apparently distasteful comments from the Left against hard targets. That's one of the threads that runs through the show and that people hopefully pick up on.

The FCC is a quasi-judicial body. It is supposed to undertake this period of public comment with a degree of seriousness and respect.

Even when I agree with the Twitterverse, I don't like the means by which they reach the conclusion. It's a really scary place. And I'm not comfortable with that.

Sloganeering and name-calling have been some of the most unsavoury aspects of Leave/Remain conflicts over the past few years.

We live in a country where posting 'Let's riot or something bruv!' on Facebook will get you a couple of years in prison, while writing a column saying we should bomb Syria is practically an entrance exam for public intellectuals.

If we want people to think, we must also want their thoughts to be communicated; and we must support a political constitution that confirms the public nature of thought.

Everyone is in favor of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people's idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage.

Some things exist only because they're talked about.

I think politics is always about dialogue. I think journalism ranges from dialogue to monologue, and there are times when different poles are necessary.

Part of what's great about America, and Canada as well, is that we can talk about our political leaders in public.

Everything is politically correct nowadays.

As a politician, I engage with all kinds of opinions irrespective of whether they are in the media or not.

I don't believe that there's such a thing as objectivity in much of journalism, but I think there is a serious effort to and a regard for facts and into taking that stuff seriously is very important to the public discourse and it's very important to democracy.

The relationships we will be discussing are among the most sensitive in contemporary America—so sensitive that hardly anyone writes or talks about them in public. It is not for lack of information, as you will see.

Criticism, any amount, we welcome it. Come, let's have a discussion - in Parliament, all the better.

It is important for us to be able to meet and greet the people that we serve. And if we start having police presence everywhere we go, it's going to create a chilling effect on discourse, and it creates an incredible assault on the democratic process.

I think you could argue that President Obama could have watched a little cable news... I do think that there is value in understanding where the conversation is and having a little less detachment where the popular conversation is.

President Trump is right about at least one thing: No matter what he does, America cannot stop talking about him.