Public Debate Quotes & Sayings

I knew all the time that it was all nonsense, but I couldn't understand in the least what it meant, or who was pulling the wires of rumour, or their purpose in so pulling. I began to wonder whether the pressure and anxiety and suspense of a terrible war had unhinged the public mind, so that it was ready to believe any fable, to debate the reasons for happenings which had never happened. — Arthur Machen

The idea of a liberal media bias is simply a myth. If only it were true, we might have a more humane, open-minded, and ultimately effective public debate on the issues facing the country. — Barbra Streisand

Scholars may contribute their knowledge or insight to public debate on important issues. They may contribute it in a form that is understandable to a policymaker, or even to the public, consistently with their duty of rigorous intellectual honesty. Scholars should not feel constrained to publish only turgid prose in obscure journals. They should not leave the public debate to those who feel no scruples whatever to conform their claims to the evidence. — Douglas Laycock

Nothing is more dangerous to one's own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of that faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate. — C.S. Lewis

Opinions are formed in a process of open discussion and public debate, and where no opportunity for the forming of opinions exists, there may be moods -moods of the masses and moods of individuals, the latter no less fickle and unreliable than the former -but no opinion. — Hannah Arendt

The point of this example is that policy debates are not matters of rational discussion on the basis of literal and objective categories. The categories that shape the debate are moral categories; those categories are defined in terms of different family-based conceptions of morality, which give priority to different metaphors for morality. The debate is not a matter of objective, means-end rationality or cost-benefit analysis or effective public policy. It is not just a debate about the particular issue, namely, college loans. The debate is about the right form of morality, and that in turn comes down to the question of the right model of the family. — George Lakoff

For a while I hoped that Buddhism Without Beliefs might stimulate more public debate and inquiry among Buddhists about these issues, but this did not happen. Instead, it revealed a fault line in the nascent Western Buddhist community between traditionalists, for whom such doctrines are non-negotiable truths, and liberals, like myself, who tend to see them more as contingent products of historical circumstance. — Stephen Batchelor

Even though I resigned as Papandreou's adviser early in 2006 and turned into his government's staunchest critic during his mishandling of the post-2009 Greek implosion, my public interventions in the debate on Greece and Europe have carried no whiff of Marxism. — Yanis Varoufakis

If the court is a political institution making important political decisions, then the public should debate the politics of Supreme Court decisions. — Marvin Ammori

I know you're on my side," an immunologist once remarked to me as we discussed the politics of vaccination. I did not agree with him, but only because I was uncomfortable with both sides, as I had seen them delineated. The debate over vaccination tends to be described with what the philosopher of science Donna Haraway would call "troubling dualisms." These dualisms pit science against nature, public against private, truth against imagination, self against other, thought against emotion, and man against woman. — Eula Biss

Is there any point in public debate in a society where hardly anyone has been taught how to think, while millions have been taught what to think? — Peter Hitchens

I think that markets classically fail in cases where there are public goods that provide benefits that people cannot capture. The big debate is how big these public goods are, where they exist, things of that sort. — Peter Thiel

Succinct, thorough, and masterfully researched-Thomas Medvetz has written a subtle and timely history of these fixtures of public debate in the United States. In the realms of culture studies, policy, and policy formation, there is no book quite like Think Tanks in America. Plus which, no one has understood, interpreted, then used Pierre Bourdieu's ideas better-so well that Bourdieu himself would have been pleased. — Charles Lemert

The opening of a public debate about male homosexuality in Britain in 1952 was the conflict of the small back room, in another sphere. — Andrew Hodges

No government by experts in which the masses do not have the chance to inform the experts as to their needs can be anything but an oligarchy managed in the interest of the few. And the enlightenment must proceed in ways which force the administrative specialists to take account of the needs. The world has suffered more from leaders and authorities than from the masses. The essential need ... is the improvement of the methods and conditions of debate, discussion and persuasion. That is the problem of the public. — John Dewey

Since social networks gained popularity extremely rapidly, there had been a debate as to whether social media was a fad. There are countless pieces of evidence now proving the contrary, among them the explosion in Twitter growth and Facebook's public listing. — Ryan Holmes

Republicans and Democrats have used accounting gimmicks and competing government analyses to deceive the public into believing that 2 + 2 = 6. If our leaders cannot agree on the numbers, if 'facts' are fictional, how can they possibly have a substantive debate on solutions? — J. C. Watts

Enjoy most: the prospect of having an impact on the public debate. Irritating liberals is a close second. — Ann Coulter

When a person's religious beliefs cause him to deny the evidence of science, or for whom public policy morphs into a battle with the devil, shouldn't that be a subject for discussion and debate? — Lawrence M. Krauss

I think it's natural for anyone that participates in a public debate to advocate for the most extreme version that they can, particularly if they believe that government tends to compromise. — Julius Genachowski

For God to be kept out of the classroom or out of America's public debate by nervous school administrators or overcautious politicians serves no one's interests. That restriction prevents people from drawing on this country's rich and diverse religious heritage for guidance, and it degrades the nation's moral discourse by placing a whole realm of theological reasoning out of bounds. The price of that sort of quarantine, at a time of moral dislocation, is - and has been - far too high. — Nancy Gibbs

Let's talk about policing and public safety. Let's debate what works and what does not. We must abandon practices that do not work, and do more of the things that actually do work to save lives. — Martin O'Malley

GDP doesn't register, as Robert Kennedy put it, "the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, or the intelligence of our public debate." GDP measures everything, Kennedy concluded, "except that which makes life worthwhile." Nor does GDP take into account unpaid work, the so-called compassionate economy. — Eric Weiner

Scientists blame the audience for being too stupid, shallow, or lazy to understand. There has been a fascinating debate in the blogosphere lately about communicating science to the public, and it's clear that most scientists just don't get it. They can't be bothered to talk to real people. Nobody will care about your issues if the price they have to pay is listening to a long lecture from Morton the science bug. — Mark Powell

And is it not the artists that make art? Well, no: criticism is now the substance of art making to such a degree that many of today's public artists do away with the product as an issue, and make public debate the contents of their art. In doing so they are not redefining art so much as redefining public space. The debate itself has become the public space. — Paul Shepheard

In this digital age, there is no place to hide behind public relations people. This digital age requires leaders to be visible and authentic and to be able to communicate the decisions they've made and why they've made them, to be able to acknowledge when they've made a mistake and to move forward, to engage in the debate. — Gail Kelly

If personal romantic and sexual behavior ends up being public, affecting public institutions and taxpayer funds, it's fair and reasonable to debate the issue, right?
Not according to many who favor alternate lifestyles. They would rather there be no debate. — Linda Harvey

When governments rely increasingly on sophisticated public relations agencies, public debate disappears and is replaced by competing propaganda campaigns, with all the accompanying deceits. Advertising isn't about truth or fairness or rationality, but about mobilising deeper and more primitive layers of the human mind. — Brian Eno

Another example of the educational inequality is the current debate over publicly financed school vouchers which will provide educational opportunities to a privileged handful, but deprive public schools of desperately needed resources. — Bobby Scott

The Chinese people have been forced to forget the Tiananmen massacre. There has been no public debate about the event, no official apology. The media aren't allowed to mention it. Still today people are being persecuted and imprisoned for disseminating information about it. — Ma Jian

We do science because we want to understand the truth. It is a constant, ongoing pursuit to understand our own biology so that we can make smart choices at an individual and policy level. If the science of breastfeeding is used first and foremost as a tool for breastfeeding promotion, we compromise public trust in science. Biased information about breastfeeding also sets up infant feeding as a debate, which sometimes escalates to mommy war status, and it doesn't need to be either of these. — Alice Callahan

Visitors wanted a perspective on the issues and risks associated with the promise of science. Addressing the public means including their questioning in the museum's presentation strategies. This is achieved on the one hand by associating the ideas and the questioning, and on the other by including social issues in the proposals submitted for debate: in short, the museum must be a true public place that the public seeks. — Massimiano Bucchi

It is not the principled partisan, however obnoxious he may seem to his opponents, who degrades our public debate, but the preening, self-styled statesman who elevates compromise to a first principle. — Tom DeLay

The surveillance of ordinary people is far greater than I would have imagined and far greater than the American public has been able to debate. — Barton Gellman

Unfortunately, science cannot be reduced to short, catchy phrases. And if this is all that the general public can comprehend, it's no wonder that we spend so much of our time in the interminable debate about belief in God, or lack thereof. — Greg Graffin

In public discourse, the challenge is not to stifle robust debate, but rather to make sure that it is real debate. The first obligation for Christians is to listen carefully to opponents and if they are not willing to do so, then Christians should simply be silent. To engage in a war of words is to engage in a symbolic violence that is fundamentally at odds with the gospel. And too often, on such hot button issues as poverty, abortion, race relations, and homosexuality, the poor, children, minorities, and gays are used as weapons in ideological warfare. This too is an expression of instrumentalization.16 — James Davison Hunter

The left is entering a new phase of ideological agitation no longer trying to win the debate but stopping debate altogether, banishing from public discourse any and all opposition. The proper word for that attitude is totalitarian. It declares certain controversies over and visits serious consequences from social ostracism to vocational defenestration upon those who refuse to be silenced. — Charles Krauthammer

Whether I'm reading a national publication or one of my local Chicago newspapers, I don't need to turn too many pages before I stumble upon another scandal. Not only do ethics violations deteriorate the public trust, but they also disrupt and undermine legitimate debate and policy. — Mike Quigley

I remember watching an episode of The West Wing about education in America, which the majority of people rightfully believe is the key to opportunity. In it, the fictional president debates whether he should push school vouchers (giving public money to schoolchildren so that they escape failing public schools) or instead focus exclusively on fixing those same failing schools. That debate is important, of course - for a long time, much of my failing school district qualified for vouchers - but it was striking that in an entire discussion about why poor kids struggled in school, the emphasis rested entirely on public institutions. As a teacher at my old high school told me recently, "They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves. — J.D. Vance

A politician's goal is always to manipulate public debate. I think there are some politicians with higher goals. But all of them get corrupted by power. — Dean Koontz

As state and federal lawmakers debate the country's energy policies and Colorado's role in the ever-expanding energy economy, let's hope they remember that unnecessary regulations stifle growth while doing nothing for public safety or health. — Bob Beauprez

Campaign season is the only time of public debate about what we want for the future. It can change consciousness even more than who gets elected. In short, campaigns may be the closest thing we have to democracy itself. — Gloria Steinem

While people are free to draw different conclusions from the facts, there should be no debate over whether the American public is entitled to have all of the facts. — Trey Gowdy

The job of the press is to encourage debate, not to supply the public with information. — Christopher Lasch

All murder is a tragedy but when journalists are killed, public debate loses a voice that can provide an important contribution to democracy. It is essential that governments do all they can to ensure safe conditions for journalists to carry out their work. — Irina Bokova

The word 'tolerance' once meant we all have the right to argue rationally for our deepest convictions in the public arena. Now it means those convictions are not even subject to rational debate. — Nancy Pearcey

In the debate over the use of antibiotics in agriculture, a distinction is usually made between their clinical and nonclinical uses. Public health advocates don't object to treating sick animals with antibiotics; they just don't want to see the drugs lose their effectiveness because factory farms are feeding them to healthy animals to promote growth. But the use of antibiotics in feedlot cattle confounds this distinction. Here the drugs are plainly being used to treat sick animals, yet the animals probably wouldn't be sick if not for the diet of grain we feed them. — Michael Pollan

The people have only a very vague direct power. They have the power of voting against the administration, again after its decisions have been taken; but they have no way of getting into the question of policy-making, decision-making, except insofar as the vague forces and pressures of public debate and public opinion have their impact on the President. The President still has to decide. He can't go to the people and ask them to decide for him; he has to make the decision. In that sense he was condemned to be a dictator. — Walter Millis

The gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. — John F. Kennedy

'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. — Marvin Ammori

Democrats are making it clear that they intend to use our economic crisis to rush through their longtime liberal goals without public scrutiny or debate ... This will increase burdens on taxpayers and take a significant step toward socialized medicine. — Jim DeMint

Talk radio is an asset to our nation because it encourages strong and healthy debate about public policy, and there is no reason to affect that debate with government legislation. — Tim Walberg

An isolated person requires correspondence as a means of seeing his ideas as others see them, and thus guarding against the dogmatisms and extravagances of solitary and uncorrected speculation. No man can learn to reason and appraise from a mere perusal of the writing of others. If he live not in the world, where he can observe the public at first hand and be directed toward solid reality by the force of conversation and spoken debate, then he must sharpen his discrimination and regulate his perceptive balance by an equivalent exchange of ideas in epistolary form. — H.P. Lovecraft

At the next election he'll offer the British public an alternative that provides weight and substance and seriousness in a political debate that is, frankly, increasingly obsessed with modishness and flim-flam. — Paddy Ashdown

Whether in private debate or in public, any attempt I made to explain how the Black Muslim movement came about, and how it has achieved such force, was met with a blankness that revealed the little connection that the liberals' attitudes have with their perceptions or their lives, or even their knowledge - revealed, in fact, that they could deal with the Negro as a symbol or a victim but had no sense of him as a man. — James Baldwin

As a woman of a certain age - and really, ever since I hit puberty and my baby-making parts were suddenly subject to public debate - I've been told over and over again that I will 'change my mind' about not wanting kids. — Jen Kirkman

The purpose of such propaganda phrases as "war on terrorism" and attacking "those who hate freedom" is to paralyze individual thought as well as to condition people to act as one mass, as when President Bush attempted to end debate on Iraq by claiming that the American people were of one voice. The modern war president removes the individual nature of those who live in it by forcing us into a uniform state where the complexities of those we fight are erased. The enemy-terrorism, Iraq, Bin Laden, Hussein-becomes one threatening category, something to be defeated and destroyed, so that the public response will be one of reaction to fear and threat rather than creatively and independently thinking for oneself. Our best hope for overcoming perpetual thinking about war and perpetual fear about both real and imagined threats is to question our leaders and their use of empty slogans that offer little rationale, explanation or historical context. — Nancy Snow

A civilian-based diplomacy supports noncommercial, nonprofit, and publicly-subsidized media to counteract the corporate-controlled, for-profit, private media that dominate political discourse; and works to place media control, ownership, and lobbying at the center of public policy debate. — Nancy Snow

Within the reigning social order, the general public must remain an object of manipulation, not a participant in thought, debate, and decision. — Noam Chomsky

The federal government seeks to control and regulate the Internet, but the last thing this Congress should be doing is trying to stifle public debate online. — Dennis Hastert

Questions of absolute good and evil are much better not opened to public debate these days, when so few people are sure of their absolutes — Sidney Howard

The first lesson, for all Canadians, is that the closed door, top down approaches to constitution making do not provide the public input or debate necessary to achieve a constitutional consensus that will be supported by the people. — Preston Manning

I think that there's going to be a rush to judgment on civil liberties, and a clamping down, a suspension of our democratic rights. And I believe that those who are good Americans would want to see this not happen and that we debate how to find a balance between the public safety and the protection of civil liberties. — Barbara Lee

We should not use special budget procedures to jam through legislation to drill in the Arctic Refuge. This topic is too important to the public to address it in such a back-door manner. We should be having a full, open discussion of the issue during an energy debate. — Russ Feingold

The problems that exist on Wall Street today go to the center of a debate in this country about wealth and democracy. We cannot keep our democracy if those who are in charge of handling the engines of our economy are not honest with their shareholders. That's why there is a role for government regulation here. That role for government is breaking up the monopolies, insisting on public disclosure, insisting on public audits, insisting on restitution whenever someone has been cheated. — Dennis Kucinich

Putting it in plain terms, the general public must be reduced to its traditional apathy and obedience, and driven from the arena of political debate and action, if democracy is to survive. — Noam Chomsky

All Renaissance drama, especially the works of Marlowe and Shakespeare, is profoundly concerned with shifting power relations within society. The individual was a new force in relation to the state. The threat of rebellion, of the overturning of established order, was forcefully brought home to the Elizabethan public by the revolt of the Earl of Essex, once the Queen's favourite. The contemporary debate questioned the relationship between individual life, the power and authority of the state, and the establishing of moral absolutes. Where mediaeval drama was largely used as a means of showing God's designs, drama in Renaissance England focuses on man, and becomes a way of exploring his weaknesses, depravities, flaws - and qualities. — Ronald Carter

In the United States, and to only slightly lesser degree in all the other rich and economically progressive Western countries, public debate has at all times been dominated by the adherents of a "free" economy. — Gunnar Myrdal

There is too much disagreement for disagreement's sake. In a time of persistent challenges that still call into question our most sacred aspirations as a country, we cannot afford shallow callous divisiveness in our public debate. — Cory Booker

Opinion pages have an impact on public debate, and they sometimes reveal things the government would rather have kept quiet. — Andrew Rosenthal

By maintaining the separation of church and state, the United States has avoided the intolerance which has so divided the rest of the world with religious wars. Throughout our two hundred plus years, public policy debate has focused on political and economic issues, on which there can be compromise ... — Barry Goldwater

I have worked to expand the health care debate beyond the current for-profit system, to include a public option and an amendment to free the states to pursue single payer. — Dennis Kucinich

The great flaw of all these administrative techniques is that, in the name of equality and democracy, they function as a vast "antipolitics machine", sweeping vast realms of legitimate public debate out of the public sphere and into the arms of technical, administrative committees. They stand in the way of potentially bracing and instructive debates about social policy, the meaning of intelligence, the selection of elites, the value of equity and diversity, and the purpose of economic growth and development. They are, in short, the means by which technical and administrative elites attempt to convince a skeptical public--while excluding the public from debate--that they play no favorites, take no obscure discretionary action, and have no biases but are merely taking transparent technical calculations. — James C. Scott

I want to say that even - and Bernie said this many, many times - in several of the actual public debates, she said on her worst day, Hillary Clinton's a thousand times better than Donald Trump. And Donald Trump, in my view, is a threat to the nation. — Jonathan Tasini

From the viewpoint of economic democracy, the capitalism-socialism debate was a debate between private and state capitalism (i.e., the private or public employment system), and the debate was as misframed as would be a debate between the private or public ownership of slaves. — David P. Ellerman

I was the candidate first time a Green or any progressive third party has ever been in a national televised debate. I was in five of them. And the response from the public was overwhelming. — Peter Camejo

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. — Sam Harris

above all the temptation to think that God is no more certain than our best arguments for him. As C. S. Lewis admitted, I have found that nothing is more dangerous to one's own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of that Faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate. For a moment, you see, it has seemed to rest on oneself: as a result, when you go away from that debate, it seems no stronger than that weak pillar. That is why we apologists take our lives in our own hands and can be saved only by falling back continually from the web of our own arguments . . . from Christian apologetics into Christ Himself. — Os Guinness

But the reporter has the responsibility to determine, number one, whether that is true, and number two, to make a judgment as to whether it's in the public interest and whether or not it should be part of the debate. — Bob Schieffer

Exploitation. Now, there's a word that has been scrubbed out of the poverty debate. 42 It is a word that speaks to the fact that poverty is not just a product of low incomes. It is also a product of extractive markets. Boosting poor people's incomes by increasing the minimum wage or public benefits, say, is absolutely crucial. But not all of those extra dollars will stay in the pockets of the poor. Wage hikes are tempered if rents rise along with them, just as food stamps are worth less if groceries in the inner city cost more - and they do, as much as 40 percent more, by one estimate. 43 Poverty is two-faced - a matter of income and expenses, input and output - and in a world of exploitation, it will not be effectively ameliorated if we ignore this plain fact. — Matthew Desmond

The public debate plays out in an infinite regress of blame over who's responsible for those who fail to fit the standard erotic mold. This is variously ascribed to the people choosing to be the deviants they are, porn, the Devil (always a shoo-in), bad parents, poor role models, our sexually repressed culture, or the psychiatrists who keep needling sexual minorities by branding them mentally ill. It's a rabbit hole of endless (and usually endlessly bad) arguments. Morally, all that matters - and allow me to reiterate that because I feel it's quite important, all that matters - is whether a person's sexual deviancy is demonstrably harmful. If it's not, and we reject the person anyway, then we're not the good guys in this scenario; we're the bad guys. — Jesse Bering

I saw no unity of purpose, no consensus on matters of philosophy or history or law. The very facts were shrouded in uncertainty: Was it a civil war? A war of national liberation or simple aggression? Who started it, and when, and why? What really happened to the USS Maddox on that dark night in the Gulf of Tonkin? Was Ho Chi Minh a Communist stooge, or a nationalist savior, or both, or neither? What about the Geneva Accords? What about SEATO and the Cold War? What about dominoes? America was divided on these and a thousand other issues, and the debate had spilled out across the floor of the United States Senate and into the streets, and smart men in pinstripes could not agree on even the most fundamental matters of public policy. The only certainty that summer was moral confusion. — Tim O'Brien

People have had certain assumptions in the past about Conservative governments, partly because of some of the things that happened in the 1980s, and partly because of the tone of some of the debate in the 1980s that appeared to say public spending on the arts was something you might want to progressively reduce. — Jeremy Hunt

You know, when I was in college, there was a big debate: Do unions raise wages? Well, with regard to industrial unions, there were arguments back and forth
international competition. It is now clear, I think, that whether or not you think unions raised wages 50 years ago, the absence of unions and their weakness that is inflicted by anti-union public policy depresses wages. The fact is that people who are not represented, in the service industries in particular, are the victims of policies which depress their wages. — Barney Frank

I'm not getting into a public debate with Jack Nicklaus. — Tim Finchem

If we conceive of free speech as promoting the search for truth - as the metaphor of "the marketplace of ideas" suggests - we should be troubled whether that search is hindered by public officials or private citizens. The same is true of democratic justifications for free speech. If the point of free speech is to facilitate the open debate that is essential for self-rule, any measure that impairs that debate should give us pause, regardless of its source. — Thomas Healy

If you are prepared to run for public office, you also have to be willing to accept a debate about you. — Wolfgang Schauble

Unequal Democracy is the sort of book to which every political scientist should aspire
it is methodologically rigorous, conceptually serious, and above all, it addresses urgent concerns of our fellow citizens. As Bartels shows, much of what we think we know about the politics of economic inequality is dead wrong. Bartels's perplexing and often unexpected discoveries should help refocus the gathering public debate about inequality and what to do about it. — Robert D. Putnam

Just as there are those who accept every UFO report at face value, there are also those who dismiss the idea of alien visitation out of hand and with great passion. It is, they say, unnecessary to examine the evidence, and "unscientific" even to contemplate the issue. I once helped to organize a public debate at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science between proponent and opponent scientists of the proposition that some UFOs were spaceships; whereupon a distinguished physicist, whose judgment in many other matters I respected, threatened to sic the Vice President of the United States on me if I persisted in this madness. (Nevertheless, the debate was held and published, the issues were a little better clarified, and I did not hear from Spiro T. Agnew.) — Carl Sagan

I think I'll always be a better playwright than a pundit, but I believe that writers should be public intellectuals and that theater, even more than film, is a place of public debate. — Tony Kushner

In Britain, the theatre has traditionally been where the public goes to think about its past and debate its future. The formation of the National Theatre, at the Old Vic, near the South Bank, in 1963, institutionalized the symbolic importance of drama by giving it both a building and state funding. — John Lahr

Since we enacted the PATRIOT Act almost three years ago, there has been tremendous public debate about its breadth and implications on due process and privacy. — Howard Berman

Rights holders, seeing how unpopular their ideas were, headed down a darker path; rather than give up on government help for such schemes, they worked to get them through with limited public debate. New Zealand's revised law, which began with the presumption that the accused were in fact infringers, was pushed through in 2011 under "urgency" rules in the wake of the major Christchurch earthquake. In the United Kingdom, the Digital Economy Act laid the groundwork for a similar scheme and had to be passed during a hurried "wash-up" session with little discussion just before new elections in 2010. — Nate Anderson

The best society, the best human existence, arrives when humans most closely determine the truth, and act on the truth, and separate it from superstition, falsity, or misinformation. And there is no better system for determining the truth than free speech: Testing the validity of an idea in the waters of public discussion and debate ... — Dave Rodgers

This heated (environmental) debate is fundamentally about numbers. How much energy could each source deliver, at what economic and social cost, and with what risks? But actual numbers are rarely mentioned. In public debates, people just say "Nuclear is a money pit" or "We have a huge amount of wave and wind." The trouble with this sort of language is that it's not sufficient to know that something is huge: we need to know how the one "huge" compares with another "huge," namely our huge energy consumption. To make this comparison, we need numbers, not adjectives. — David Mackay

The DEFENSE of anything is UNTENABLE. The only way to defend anything is to ATTACK, and if you ever forget that, then you will lose every battle you are ever engaged in, whether it is in terms of personal conversation, public debate, or a court of law. NEVER BE INTERESTED IN CHARGES. DO, yourself, much MORE CHARGING, and you will WIN. — L. Ron Hubbard

Men of many words sometimes argue for the sake of talking; men of ready tongues frequently dispute for the sake of victory; men in public life often debate for the sake of opposing the ruling party, or from any other motive than the love of truth. — George Crabbe

We debate sometimes what is to be the future of this nation when we think that in a few years public affairs may be in the hands of the fin-de-siecle gilded youths we see about us during the Christmas holidays. Such foppery, such luxury, such insolence,was surely never practiced by the scented, overbearing patricians of the Palatine, even in Rome's most decadent epoch. In all the wild orgy of wastefulness and luxury with which the nineteenth century reaches its close, the gilded youth has been surely the worst symptom. — Booth Tarkington

But one thing is certain: the commandments have not changed. Let there be no mistake about that. Right is still right. Wrong is still wrong, no matter how cleverly cloaked in respectability or political correctness. We believe in chastity before marriage and fidelity ever after. That standard is an absolute standard of truth. It is neither subject to public opinion polls nor dependent upon situation or circumstance. There is no need to debate it or other gospel standards. — M. Russell Ballard

There are some rights that are so fundamental to our society that you'd think the public debate would be closed on them. The right of every American citizen to vote - regardless of age, race, or income level - is one of them. — Martin O'Malley