39 quotes found
“If you've got the truth you can demonstrate it. Talking doesn't prove it.”
“In all debates, let truth be thy aim, not victory, or an unjust interest.”
“Get what you can with words, because words are free, but the words of an armed man ring that much sweeter.”
“So why don't they face us... examine our evidence, debate, talk... act like real historians instead of thought-police? Why shut us out of the media, pass laws against our speaking, persecute us, su...”
“Just because some dreams never see light that doesnt make us nonbelievers, they are wings to our sky and fiction makes us dream. I know the truth is fatal, especially for the stubborns but trust me...”
“Maisie bit her lip. She had learned that sometimes it was best to let words die of their own accord, rather than fight them.”
“Meanings with no purpose are useful for meaningless debates on what the "meaner" meant. And that's what #politics is all about - misreading.”
“You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic.”
“The real battlefield is the realm of ideas.”
“The thing that strikes me more and more, is the extraordinary viciousness and dishonesty of political controversy in our time. I dont mean merely that controversies are acrimonious. They ought to b...”
“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...”
“...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.”
“[M]an has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to having a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn't think of doctrines as primarily "true" or "false,"...”
“One reader of an early draft of this chapter complained at this point, saying that by treating the hypothesis of God as just one more scientific hypothesis, to be evaluated by the standards of scie...”
“Come on people! Somebody disagree with me! How can we learn anything if no one will disagree?" Rabbi Stern”
“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...”
“Take the Pyramids. Great blocks of useless masonry, put up to minister to the egoism of a despotic bloated king. Think of the sweated masses who toiled to build them and died doing it. It makes me ...”
“In his early days at University, he'd been too green to realize winning debates, even private ones, would lose him friends.”
“People should think of their words like seeds. They should plant them, then let them grow in silence. Our old people taught us that the earth is always speaking to us, but that we have to be silent...”
“On matters where it is difficult or impossible to pin the blame for their policies' failures on conservatives, the fallback position has been to hurl a slur at anyone pointing out the obvious failu...”
