489 Quotes About Debate

Our fight for justice will be equivalent to high school and college debate teams where it is all academic and sterile in the end. Whether or not truth wins will be irrelevant to the society and a dystopia is all we produce as a consequence.

Demagoguery is powerfully reduced when it stops getting people elected, and that usually happens because of in-group policing. Similarly, when it isn't profitable for a media outlet to engage in demagoguery, it won't, and that happens when its target market declines to put up with it. Individual demagogues are best stopped by in-group condemnation, and particular strains of demagoguery are generally ended by public shaming.

Rational well-argued evidence, not intimidation, will be the way to make progress.

An idle mind does not think.

Politics is good; when it works properly, disagreements get solved without people beating each other up. But when a regime knows its days are numbered, there's always the chance it may use its position to change the rules and make the debate it is losing irrelevant.

The walls we build around us to keep the noise out only reverberate the same ideas, notions and beliefs we enforce, leaving no room for debate. When we opt out of an argument we are choosing to ignore opposing views thereby failing to understand the other.

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

A second marked characteristic of the Liberal in debate with the conservative is the tacit premise that debateis ridiculous....Many people shrink from arguments over facts because facts are tedious, because they require a formal familiarity with the subject under discussion, and because they can be ideologically dislocative. Many Liberals accept their opinions, ideas, and evaluations as others accept revealed truths.

Sometimes, but not often, I am thoroughly convinced that the decision I have made is the right one, even though it differs from the others, and I will exercise my authority to approve or reject a decision against their wishes. In most cases, though, if we can’t agree on something, a better idea is to table the decision rather than to exercise the power.