Best 472 quotes in «debate quotes» category

Christian writers, whether they like it or not, do not simply write for themselves; for good or ill, readers will see their work as reflecting Jesus Christ and his church. And if only for this reason - though there are other reasons - one must take great care when dealing with potentially controversial topics not to imagine one's every pronouncement preceded by 'Thus saith the Lord.' The law of love, on which 'all the law and the prophets' depend (Matt. 22:40), mandates charity toward one's opponents in argument.

Civility is a style of argument that implicitly welcomes response. It is a display of respect and tolerance, which make clear that you are engaging in a conversation, not delivering a last word. Unlike contempt, which generally seems less about your targets than about creating an ugly spectacle for your own partisans to enjoy, a civil argument is a plea to all fellow citizens to respond, even if in opposition. It invites the broader body of concerned citizens to fill in the gaps in my knowledge, to correct the flaws in my argument and to continue to deliberate in a rapidly changing world.

...civility doesn't require consensus or the suspension of criticism. It is simply the ability to disagree productively with others while respecting their sincerity and decency.

Come on people! Somebody disagree with me! How can we learn anything if no one will disagree?" Rabbi Stern

Consider the people who routinely disagree with you. See how confident they look while being dead wrong? That’s exactly how you look to them.

Cop-out excuses and catch-phrase dismissals can only work so long before the holes in the religious argument cannot be ignored any longer.

De som har makt over ordene bør være edru blant de rasende.

Debate, but do not argue. Challenge, but do not force your opinions. To win an argument, but lose a friendship, is a loss. To lose an argument, but retain a friendship, is gain.

Debate is an attempt to cling to the illusion of control provided by a point of view designed to keep the ego in place; dialogue is an attempt to dance with the unknown at the risk of losing what we think we know.

Dialogue unplugs you from your own programming as you become more real; debate turns up the voltage and entrenches you more deeply.

Discussions, debates and even arguments will be fruitful if done with an open mind.

Discuss, don't debate.

Does giving your piece of mind, bring a peace of mind? Or is it better to be silent and let the war inside subside?

Dissenting opinions are useful, even when they are wrong.

Don’t curse the gods; you will feel shame when you have to call on them for help

Don't create unbelief or doubt in people's minds. When you do so you ruin their lives and you have nothing to give them in its place. It's ok if people delude themselves; those delusions keep their day running.

Edward genially enough did not disagree with what I said, but he didn't seem to admit my point, either. I wanted to press him harder so I veered close enough to the ad hominem to point out that his life—the life of the mind, the life of the book collector and music lover and indeed of the gallery-goer, appreciator of the feminine and occasional boulevardier—would become simply unlivable and unthinkable in an Islamic republic. Again, he could accede politely to my point but carry on somehow as if nothing had been conceded. I came slowly to realize that with Edward, too, I was keeping two sets of books. We agreed on things like the first Palestinian intifadah, another event that took the Western press completely off guard, and we collaborated on a book of essays that asserted and defended Palestinian rights. This was in the now hard-to-remember time when all official recognition was withheld from the PLO. Together we debated Professor Bernard Lewis and Leon Wieseltier at a once-celebrated conference of the Middle East Studies Association in Cambridge in 1986, tossing and goring them somewhat in a duel over academic 'objectivity' in the wider discipline. But even then I was indistinctly aware that Edward didn't feel himself quite at liberty to say certain things, while at the same time feeling rather too much obliged to say certain other things. A low point was an almost uncritical profile of Yasser Arafat that he contributed to Interview magazine in the late 1980s.

Each mind conceives god in its own way. There may be as many variation of the god figure as there are people in the world

Ecologist Paul Ehrlich stressed that people who hold opposing opinions need to engage in open discussion with well-reasoned dissent. Positions should be questioned and criticized, not the people who hold them. Personal attacks preclude open discussion because, once someone is put on the defensive, fruitful exchanges are impossible, at least for the moment.

Don't fight to be right, but fight when you are right.

Even a book that is made up of only untruths can greatly improve us intellectually.

Engaging solely to validate your opinion takes away from the character building process.

God has not yet revealed himself to no one in no unclear terms. Religions are attempts to find him; on that level they are all equal

Excluding certain ideas and thoughts, calling them hate speech, is an important piece in the progressive movement’s puzzle. If you can’t win an argument logically, demonize your opponent, make him out to be a bad person and all of a sudden the ideas he stands for become bad as well.

From the introduction "After all, the great joy of literature, as opposed to politics or religion, is that it embraces differing opinions, it encourages debate, it allows us to have heated conversations with our closes friends and dearest loved ones. And through it all, no one gets hurt, no one gets taken away from their homes, and no one gets killed.

Free speech and debate are essential in our search for the truth.

Get what you can with words, because words are free, but the words of an armed man ring that much sweeter.

Guns make small men feel big.

Good questions are to be appreciated, not answered.

He likes to use his wit and verbal finesse to confuse others and win arguments. Although he can argue successfully that white is black and straight is crooked, you walk away with the feeling that he's won the argument not because he is correct but because you can't outwit him.

Hate. The word is thrown around as uselessly and as often as love is, and is used as a means in which to accuse and inflict damage; the weak-in-argument (weak in general) use it to discredit those with whom they disagree rather than dissect the issues for what they really are. I liken it to the predictable ad hominem attack, which is about as transparent as those who so ridiculously claim to know what’s in the heart of another.

He listened to their opinions, stated his own, and supported them with reasons; and from his being constantly occupied with such meditations, it resulted, that when in command no complication could ever present itself with which he was not prepared to deal.

Healthy debate occurs when people can agree that they have differences of opinions, not differences in facts.

He could argue a case for anything, but that doesn’t change the fact he’s wrong most of the time.

He who cannot put his thoughts on ice should not enter into the heat of dispute.

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.

How can you say anything other than Ratatouille is Pixar's best movie? Your a chef, for Christ's sake," Sue said. Lou smiled at Sue's accusatory tone. She needed this distraction. Harley rolled his eyes and said, "You're letting your biases show, Sue. Up uses music better- like a character. The opening fifteen minutes is some of the best filmmaking- ever. And who doesn't love a good squirrel joke?" "But Ratatouille brings it all back to food." Sue waved a carrot in the air to emphasize her point. "They made you want to eat food cooked by a rat! I'd eat the food; it looked magnificent. That rat cooked what he loved; what tasted good. Like I've been telling Lou, we should cook food from the heart, not just the cookbook.

If you go about dehumanizing your opponents […] you're never going to convince them to change.

I don't often agree with me either; there's much, in fact, with which I disagree. But that's probably because I'm so dashed ingenious that I haven't a clue what I'm saying.

I don't pretend to know everything; I just only speak on matters I know I'll win.

If people are not dancing to your tune, change the song.

If the majority view, whether in government or in the scientific establishment, is wrong, toleration of dissent increases the odds that their errors will eventually be discovered. But even if the majority view is correct, as it often may be, it is more likely to be seen to be correct if it must defend itself against critics.

If you don't agree with me, I have two words for you: shut the fuck up.

If you held to principle so passionately, so inflexibly, indifferent in the particulars of circumstance - the full range of what human beings, with all their flaws and foibles, might endure or create - if you enthroned principle above even reason, weren't you then abdicating the responsibilities of a thinking person?

Idolatry happens when you worship or praise anything excessively to the point of causing you to believe it reigns supreme. All things on this earth are temporal, even your very own desires. Be careful that you do not create idols to worship.

I don’t like debating issues because they frame conversations in such a way that if you learn from it you emerge as the biggest loser.

If we want to use a physical analogy, a more accurate one would show that many of our beliefs are like boulders pushed off from the top of a mountain. The boulder tips, and the thousands of contours of the mountainside, along with any trees (or lack thereof), its hardness, etc., react to the shape, size, and contours of the boulder itself. Rainfalls alter how much cushion the earth gives when the boulder slams into it and how much trees and shrubs will bend before breaking. All of these variables mix and, based on its bounces and rotations, the boulder lands in a very specific spot at the bottom. In many ways, this is how we form many of our beliefs—by countless, unique mental influences pushing us this way and that.

If you put it as 'complex nervous systems' it sounds pretty deflationary. What's so special about a complex nervous system? But of course, that complex nervous system allows you to do calculus. It allows you to do astrophysics… to write poetry... to fall in love. Put under that description, when asked 'What’s so special about humans...?', I’m at a loss to know how to answer that question. If you don’t see why we’d be special… because we can do poetry [and] think philosophical thoughts [and] we can think about the morality of our behavior, I’m not sure what kind of answer could possibly satisfy you at that point. ...I could pose the same kinds of questions of you... So God says, 'You are guys are really, really special.' How does his saying it make us special? 'But you see, he gave us a soul.' How does our having a soul make us special? Whatever answer you give, you could always say… 'What’s so special about that?

In my view, ideas and other intellectual productions are more interesting, more indicative of intelligence, and more productively debated than IQ alone.

I know quite well why I became a historian.... It was because dissension was frowned upon when I was a child: 'Don't argue, Claudia,' 'Claudia, you must not answer back like that.' Argument, of course, is the whole point of history. Disagreement; my word against yours; this evidence against that. If there were such a thing as absolute truth the debate would lose its lustre. I, for one, would no longer be interested.