Debate Quotes - Page 37

• Tonight was the CNN primary debate with the four remaining candidates. It was kind of a change for Newt Gingrich. Usually when he's arguing with three people at once, it's his wife, his ex-wife, and his mistress.

  Jay Leno

  Cnn, Wife, People

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• The first presidential debate was down in Florida. Residents spent all day putting plywood on their televisions.

  David Letterman

  Florida, Presidential, Television

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• The internet's perfect for all manner of things, but productive discussion ain't one of them. It provides scant room for debate and infinite opportunities for fruitless point-scoring: the heady combination of perceived anonymity, gestated responses, random heckling and a notional “live audience” quickly conspire to create a “perfect storm” of perpetual bickering.

  Charlie Brooker

  Opportunity, Perfect, Storm

  Charlie Brooker (2009). “Dawn of the Dumb”, p.164, Faber & Faber

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• There is still much debate about whether torture has been effective in eliciting information - the assumption being, apparently, that if it is effective, then it may be justified.

  Noam Chomsky

  Information, May, Assumption

  Noam Chomsky (2016). “Who Rules the World?”, p.39, Metropolitan Books

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• A group of women who valued motherhood, but valued it on their own timetable, began to make a new claim, one that had never surfaced in the abortion debate before this, that abortion was a woman's right. Most significantly, they argued that this right to abortion was essential to their right to equality -- the right to be treated as individuals rather than as potential mothers.

  Kristin Luker

  Mother, Abortion, Groups

  Kristin Luker (1985). “Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood”, p.92, Univ of California Press

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• I think the American people expect more from us than cries of indignation and attack. The times are too grave, the challenge too urgent, and the stakes too high - to permit the customary passions of political debate.

  John F. Kennedy

  Passion, Thinking, People

  Presidential Nomination Acceptance Speech, en.wikisource.org. July 15, 1960.

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• That there is a continuous link from humans to gorillas, with the intermediate species merely long dead, is beyond the understanding of speciesists. Tie the label Homo sapiens even to a tiny piece of insensible embryonic tissue, and its life suddenly leaps to infinite, incomputable value.... Self-styled pro-lifers, and others that indulge in footling debates about exactly when in its development a foetus becomes human, exhibit the same discontinuous mentality. Human, to the discontinuous mind, is an absolutist concept. There can be no half measures. And from this flows much evil.

  Richard Dawkins

  Self, Indulge In, Ties

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• We really have no choice but to pray and encourage a return to an America steeped in Judeo-Christian values. It is either that or taking our chances in a society with no values at all. For all Americans the former carries certain risks, but the latter spells certain doom. For now, we should not be deflected by theological debate from the life-saving tasks awaiting us. There is work to be done. We must ensure that America will continue to be part of God's plan for the world.

  Daniel Lapin

  Christian, America, Choices

  Rabbi Daniel Lapin (2012). “America's Real War”, p.526, Multnomah

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• 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

  Thinking, People, Benefits

  Interview with Victoria Brown, bigthink.com. November 15, 2010.

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• The thing that surprised me the most is just how much money women that weren't rich were paying for their hair. When you're in a beauty parlor in Harlem next to abandoned buildings and somebody's paying five grand for a weave, that's a bit much. I think this is, in a weird way, part of the health care debate. It's like, hmm, there's people with $2000 weaves that could have bought health care with that weave money.

  Chris Rock

  Thinking, Hair, People

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• It took six weeks of debate in the Senate to get the Arms Embargo Law repealed--and we face other delays during the present session because most of the Members of the Congress are thinking in terms of next Autumn's election. However, that is one of the prices that we who live in democracies have to pay. It is, however, worth paying, if all of us can avoid the type of government under which the unfortunate population of Germany and Russia must exist.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  Autumn, Thinking, Russia

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• There is no debate in the scientific community...We need [Congress] to change things, not to deny what's happening.

  Bill Nye

  Leadership, Nature, Science

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• A wise man once said, 'Every one of us is given the gift of life, and what a strange gift it is. If it is preserved jealously and selfishly, it impoverishes and saddens. But if it is spent for others, it enriches and beautifies.' My fellow Americans: We can debate policies and programs, but in the end what separates the two parties in this election campaign is whether we use the gift of life for others or only ourselves.

  Geraldine Ferraro

  Wise, Party, Men

  Vice Presidential Nomination Acceptance Address, delivered 19 July 1984 at the Democratic National Convention, San Francisco

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• Facts are to the mind what food is to the body. On the due digestion of the former depend the strength and wisdom of the one, just as vigor and health depend on the other. The wisest in council, the ablest in debate, and the most agreeable companion in the commerce of human life, is that man who has assimilated to his understanding the greatest number of facts.

  Edmund Burke

  Men, Numbers, Understanding

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• Western traditions of education have emphasized knowledge analysis, description and debate. They all have a part to play, but today there is a whole vast aspect of doing that has just been left out. Operacy is what keeps society going.

  Edward de Bono

  Education, Play, Analysis

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• ...Negroes must concern themselves with every single means of struggle: legal, illegal, passive, active, violent and non- violent.... They must harass, debate, petition, boycott, sing hymns, pray on steps--and shoot from their windows when the racists come cruising through their communities.... The acceptance of our condition is the only form of extremism which discredits us before our children [ellipses in source].

  Lorraine Hansberry

  Children, Struggle, Mean

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• And therefore, as when there is a controversy in an account, the parties must by their own accord, set up for right Reason, the Reason of some Arbitrator, or Judge, to whose sentence, they will both stand, or their controversy must either come to blows, or be undecided, for want of a right Reason constituted by Nature; so is it also in all debates of what kind soever.

  Thomas Hobbes

  Party, Blow, Judging

  Thomas Hobbes (2016). “The Essential Leviathan: A Modernized Edition”, p.25, Hackett Publishing

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• [T]he seeds of [the Argument Culture] can be found our classrooms, where a teacher will introduce an article or an idea . . . setting up debates where people learn not to listen to each other because they're so busy trying to win the debate.

  Deborah Tannen

  Teacher, Winning, Ideas

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• When you say politics, you conjure a whole bunch of associations: elections, campaigning, debates, fundraising. None of this exists in Russia! We are still fighting not for election victories but for having elections at all.

  Garry Kasparov

  Fighting, Fundraising, Russia

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• I am dead against trying to keep religious conservatives out of the political debate. The tactic of exclusion is self-defeating.

  Harvey Cox

  Christian, Religious, Self

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• 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

  Christian, Country, Religious

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• When a minister or a clergyman takes seriously unfashionable Christian doctrines which condemn sex outside marriage, homosexuality, abortion, and feminism, and injects his views into the political debate, he is immediately denounced as a 'reactionary.'

  Benjamin Hart

  Christian, Religious, Sex

  Benjamin Hart (1988). “Faith & Freedom: The Christian Roots of American Liberty”

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• The criticism usually goes only to the religious right. 'Bigots,' 'intolerant,' 'hateful' - those labels get slapped on quickly and usually when we are winning debates and scoring points against liberals.

  Kay Coles James

  Christian, Religious, Winning

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• The Senate used to be a place of great debate and accomplishment. Now it is run like a dictatorship shutting out the voices of millions of Americans.

  John Cornyn

  Leadership, Running, Party

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• My first debate in high school--"Resolved: Girls are no good"--and I won!

  Donald Freed

  Girl, Women, School

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