Debates Quotes

“Naive people tend to generalize people as—-good, bad, kind, or evil based on their actions. However, even the smartest person in the world is not the wisest or the most spiritual, in all matters. We are all flawed. Maybe, you didn’t know a few of these things about Einstein, but it puts the notion of perfection to rest. Perfection doesn’t exist in anyone. Nor, does a person’s mistakes make them less valuable to the world.

1. He divorced the mother of his children, which caused Mileva, his wife, to have a break down and be hospitalized.

2.He was a ladies man and was known to have had several affairs; infidelity was listed as a reason for his divorce.

3.He married his cousin.

4.He had an estranged relationship with his son.

5. He had his first child out of wedlock.

6. He urged the FDR to build the Atom bomb, which killed thousands of people.

7. He was Jewish, yet he made many arguments for the possibility of God. Yet, hypocritically he did not believe in the Jewish God or Christianity. He stated, “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Be transparent. Let's build a community that allows hard questions and honest conversations so we can stir up transformation in one another.”
― Germany Kent

“We seldom learn much from someone with whom we agree.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Whenever they are condemning weaves or breast implants, some people speak so passionately that their false teeth almost fall out.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“I never discuss anything else except politics and religion. There is nothing else to discuss.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“It is debatable whether blind faith is truly faith at all. Faith is the perceptive gray area where scientific facts meet an individual's experiential truths - the extreme of the former is left feeling in the dark whereas the latter is caught blinded by the light. By proper scientific method, it is intellectually dishonest for me to declare the existence of God with utmost certainty, but to my individual spirit, I would be intellectually dishonest to deny the existence of God even for a second. This leaves the best of both worlds, as the believer is called to be able to give reasons for his faith, a deviation from mere fantasy.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Levin had often noticed in discussion between the most intelligent people that after enormous efforts, and endless logical subtleties and talk, the disputants finally became aware that what they had been at such pains to prove to one another had long ago, from the beginning of the argument, been known to both, but that they liked different things, and would not define what they liked for fear of its being attacked. He had often had the experience of suddenly in the middle of a discussion grasping what it was the other liked and at once liking it too, and immediately he found himself agreeing, and then all arguments fell away useless. Sometimes the reverse happened: he at last expressed what he liked himself, which he had been arguing to defend and, chancing to express it well and genuinely, had found the person he was disputing with suddenly agree.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“The first thing people usually do when they decide to reduce the outrage in their lives is stop talking about politics altogether - or at least stop arguing with people who disagree with them. This is exactly the wrong response. We are supposed to argue about politics; we're just supposed to figure out how to do it without shouting at the top of our lungs and calling each other stupid or evil.

Democracy calls us to have uncomfortable conversations. It asks us to listen to each other even when we would rather be listening to ourselves - or to people enough like us that we might as well be listening to ourselves. It is easier and more comfortable for us to live in perpetual high dudgeon inside our echo chambers than it is to have a meaningful conversation with people who disagree with us. The entire outrage industry has been designed to keep us in our bubbles, never challenged by disagreement and never required to think that we might be wrong.”
― Michael Austin, We Must Not Be Enemies: Restoring America's Civic Tradition

“We usually learn from debates that we seldom learn from debates.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Our community deserves leaders who should know what debates and arguments are better conducted out of the public eye, instead of dumping their baskets of dirty laundry all over the internet. Our community deserves leaders who do not put political expedience or convenience before their commitments to those they supposedly represent. Our community deserves leaders who do not make about-turns on issues such as freedom of speech and accountability to the community they serve when it becomes too embarrassing for them, or too uncomfortable. Our community deserves leaders who can and want to work together, not fling their handbags at each other, hissing like drama queens.”
― Christina Engela

“There was a fascinating duality about Matthew that Daisy had never encountered in another man. At some moments he was the aggressive, sharp-eyed, buttoned-up businessman who rattled off facts and figures with ease.
At other times he was a gentle, understanding lover who shed his cynicism like an old coat and engaged her in playful debates about which ancient culture had the best mythology, or what Thomas Jefferson's favorite vegetable had been. (Although Daisy was convinced it was green peas, Matthew had made an excellent case for tomatoes.)
They had long conversations about subjects like history and progressive politics. For a man from a conservative Brahmin background, he had a surprising awareness of reform issues. Usually in their relentless climb up the social ladder, enterprising men forgot about those who had been left on the bottom rungs. Daisy thought it spoke well of Matthew's character that he had a genuine concern for those less fortunate than himself.”
― Lisa Kleypas, Scandal in Spring

“Our agreement or disagreement is at times based on a misunderstanding.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Almost no one gets into an argument hoping to be proven wrong if they are wrong.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Like pretty much every debate, an argument is an explosion caused by the collision of egos.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Not everybody believes in the possibility of political persuasion. Many people see political positions as expressions of innate personality traits - hard-wired into us either by our genes or by an irreversible process of socialization. Why should we waste time trying to be persuasive when people never really change their minds? This is a reasonable concern.

The idea that persuasion doesn't work comes from a bad application of good science. A substantial body of research suggests that our political beliefs are shaped by more or less fixed psychological characteristics ... Research like this, however, tells us about the difficulty of conversion, not persuasion. These are not the same things. We too often misrepresent the task of political persuasion by thinking of the most strident partisan we have ever encountered and imagining what it would take to turn that person into an equally strident partisan for the other side. This sort of Paul-on-the-Road-to-Damascus conversion rarely happens in politics. Most people don't change their fundamental values, and if we expect them to, we are going to be very disappointed.

But we usually don't need people to change their fundamental values in order to convince them to adopt a particular position. The fact that people have fundamental values makes it possible to persuade them by appealing to those values. But we have to find values that we really share.”
― Michael Austin, We Must Not Be Enemies: Restoring America's Civic Tradition

“Museums alone cannot ease the tensions that come from the debates surrounding the fluidity of national identity in the twenty-first century. Nor can any cultural institution solve the problems of poverty, racial injustice, and police violence. But museums can contribute to understanding by creating spaces where debates are spirited but reasoned. Where contemporary challenges are addressed through contextualization and education.”
― Lonnie G. Bunch III, A Fool's Errand: Creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the Age of Bush, Obama, and Trump

“Debates are just intelligent entertainment.”
― Thomas Vato

“[...] a conversa descuidada custa vidas, mas é bem verdade também que as vidas descuidadas custam conversa.”
― C.S. Lewis, Cristianismo Puro e Simples

“Rationality is the way to lead life. So high time,
let’s stop feeding our dreams and shake hands with the reality.”
― Parul Wadhwa, The Masquerade

“Almost all political debates by politicians are no more than mutual leg pulling.”
― Ravi Ranjan Goswami

“Discuss, don't debate.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Fabric of Humanity

“It is the power of temperance, the steadying hand of wisdom, and the warmth of love for all that shapes my words even in the midst of the most heightened of disagreements. For if I allow temperance, wisdom and the warmth of love to guide any engagement I may have (even though it might be one with my most hostile enemy), I will have set the stage for a place where seemingly unassailable walls can come down, hands can be extended in unexpected friendship, and the impossible is made impossibly possible.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Decisions are stubborn things, but debates about them are pliable.”
― Prof.Salam Al Shereida

“The difference between the having and being modes can be easily observed in two examples of conversations. Let us take a typical conversational
debate between two men in which A has opinion X and B has opinion Y.Each identifies with his own opinion. What matters to each is to find
better, i.e., more reasonable, arguments to defend his opinion. Neither expects to change his own opinion, or that his opponent's opinion will
change. Each is afraid of changing his own opinion, precisely because it is one of his possessions, and hence its loss would mean an impoverishment.”
― Erich Fromm, To Have or to Be? The Nature of the Psyche

“The truth of the matter is that all that matters is nothing if seen through the lens of the one that makes things matter.”
― Martin Uzochukwu Ugwu

“Yes. Fell in love with JB Peterson. Fell in love. You know, that manly kind of love. Bromance. He kinda looks like Jeremy Irons. And he says he liked to drink a lot, at least a few decades ago. And he even says the right words, too. He says, tell the truth, listen to your conscience, face your fears. He says he HAS a conscience. But follow through? No. Not much follow through. He starts talking shit about Marxists, and then a real academic wants to debate him, and what does he do? What does Peterson do? He goes back to his fucking Pinocchio cartoons and talking shit about Marxists with some dumb cunt in Madrid instead of facing the dude (Wolff) in Idaho. My heart is broken. Another fucking coward. Reminds me of my daddy. And now this dumb cunt (Peterson) is in a Russian rehab. Hopefully they’ll talk some sense into him there. I could probably debate him in my sleep, and possibly drunk, simultaneously. Grow up, buddy. And stop doing drugs.”
― Dmitry Dyatlov

“Women did not stand by and watch these changes occur. They participated, tangentially and head on, in debates about history writing that effected change.”
― Devoney Looser, British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670-1820

“It doesn't matter if you are right or wrong, all it matters is if you won a debate or argument".”
― Eddy Alvarez

“The former president buzzes in. “The biggest problem we have is that America just doesn’t win anymore. Whether it’s trade deals or military actions. As your president, I’ll get America winning again. We’ll soon be back and banging beautiful broads like we used to.”

“That’s uglyaphobic, and unfair to attractively challenged Americans. I go back to Thomas Jefferson, ‘All men are created equal,’ and…while you know…you know the deal.”

“Even now, people stop me on the street and say what an awesome peacemaker I am. On day one, the Ukrainian war ends. I’ll get both leaders in a room. There’ll be tough negotiations, but they’ll be fair. There’ll be diplomatic sleepovers in Moscow and Kyiv, where no fighting will be tolerated except a robust pillow fight. Pretty soon I’ll be considered the greatest peacemaker of all time, bigger than Gandhi or the Dalai Lama. Maybe not as great as Christ, but a close second.”
― Gary Floyd, This Side of Reality: How to survive this war and the next 15 to follow

“You don’t win a debate by suppressing discussion, you win it with a better argument.”
― Frank Sonnenberg, BECOME: Unleash the Power of Moral Character and Be Proud of the Life You Choose