Quotes About Public discourse

Cable news tends to be talking points - you don't have that much time to substantively unpack an issue.

'Negative liberty' is a political science term meaning a liberty from government action. It is not a liberty to anything - like the liberty to meaningfully contribute to public debate or to have ample spaces for speech.

The president of the League of Women Voters and the Chairwoman of the Sully Township Concerned Citizens' Committee were rumored to be close to trial by combat in city council meetings.

Ideas matter—and philosophy is the art of thinking about them rigorously. In my view, that should be done in as public a forum as possible.

I understand there is a need for a stable and orderly transition to that leadership, but that people should give me the space to ensure that happens and that this debate is not best conducted in the pages of the Mail on Sunday.

You'd have thought he would have an opinion about something – the weather, the government, the earthquake in Fukushima, the marriage of Prince William. But he never talked about anything except the matter in hand.

There are some people who argue that we are too sensitive these days, that because we're so afraid of causing offence, we no longer engage in any serious sort of argument at all. But that's how it is. It's why political chat-shows on television have become so very boring. There are narrow lines between which all public conversations have to take place and even a single poorly chosen word can bring all sorts of trouble down on your head.

Democracy provides the space for open criticism.

I had to read Plato and Kant, and at times I was overwhelmed. But I have always been fearless, and so was Hannah Arendt. She wasn't afraid to speak out when she knew her opinions would not be popular because she believed in the public discourse above all.

Let me make the Workers' Party's position clear: When we deal with public discourse, I think it's very helpful, in fact it's critical, that we all deal with objective information.

Public discourse about climate change has resulted in the erroneous idea that it's all about cost, burden and sacrifice. If the math was correct, everyone would see it's about profit, jobs and competitive advantage.

Look I can't get into the minds of people who made decisions to support us or support anybody else. But I can tell you that Scott Lively, a lot of what he says and a lot of what he believes doesn't belong in public discourse.

In the past, great communicators were great orators, but great communicators today sound conversational, and interrupting is common in conversation. And public discourse is now more about entertainment than enlightenment.

The public discourse online is not done through the polite language of debate.

Do we seek delicate phraseology in politics or other forms of public life? We do not.

It's a little bit of a shame when I see some fans saying, 'Can you do me a favor and not ask questions to the fighters or the athletes about political stuff, cause we don't care about their opinions, we don't want to hear that, this is not that platform, if we wanted to hear that we would turn to CNN or FOX or ABC,' or whatever the case may be.

Free speech is never out of the news.

I have grown up in a country where we are told that there is freedom of speech.

There's so many shows, whether it's 'Last Week Tonight' or 'The Daily Show' or 'Full Frontal' or 'Late Night With Seth Meyers,' that are really doing great stuff talking about what's going on in the world and what's going on with the president, and those stories that everyone winds up talking about, whether on social media or in their jobs.

Proposition 19 already is a winner no matter what happens on election day. The mere fact of its being on the ballot has elevated and legitimized public discourse about marijuana and marijuana policy in ways I could not have imagined a year ago.

The one thing that is distinctive about America historically has been the fact that we are all able to engage in public discourse without the political becoming personal.

In my opinion, theater shouldn't give advice to citizens.

During the Charlottesville protests, Trump saw nuance—there was violence on "many sides," there was "blame on both sides," and there were "many fine people" among the neo-Nazis.

Our public discourse appears permanently riven by conspiracy theories.