Public Debate Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. A culture's ability to understand the world and itself is critical to its survival. But today we are led into the arena of public debate by seers whose main gift is their ability to compel people to continue to watch them.

George Saunders

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. The discourse of the West and the attitudes of its leaders are important because they influence public debate in Turkey.

Safak Pavey

#16. In the midst of fighting there is no place for public debate.

Yitzhak Rabin

#17. Enjoy most: the prospect of having an impact on the public debate. Irritating liberals is a close second.

Ann Coulter

#18. 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

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

Andrew Rosenthal

#20. 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

#21. I'm not getting into a public debate with Jack Nicklaus.

Tim Finchem

#22. 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

#23. That's one of the major lessons: no president should ever take this nation to war without full public debate in the Congress and/or in the public.

Robert McNamara

#24. '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

#25. Markets are useful instruments for organizing productive activity. But unless we want to let the market rewrite the norms that govern social institutions, we need a public debate about the moral limits of markets.

Michael J. Sandel

#26. 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

#27. I almost became a political journalist, having worked as a reporter at the time of Watergate. The proximity to those events motivated me, when I wound up doing philosophy, to try to use it to move the public debate.

Michael Sandel

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. The job of the press is to encourage debate, not to supply the public with information.

Christopher Lasch

#36. If you are prepared to run for public office, you also have to be willing to accept a debate about you.

Wolfgang Schauble

#37. What we owe future generations is the subject of growing debate by economists, philosophers, ethicists, public policymakers, and academics of all stripes. But for me as a mother, the moral implications are very clear. We owe them clean air and fresh water, a healthy planet and a secure future.

Leonor Varela

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. Debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust and wide-open and that ... may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.

William J. Brennan

#44. 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

#45. We now have an opportunity, though, to do something we didn't do in the industrial age, and that is to get a leg up on this, to bring the public in quickly, to have an informed debate.

Jeremy Rifkin

#46. 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

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

Noam Chomsky

#48. 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

#49. There's a long-standing debate in the media biz over whether the news outlets should give the public what it wants, or what it needs. This debate presupposes that media execs actually know what it wants or needs. And that there actually is a unitary "public.

Brooke Gladstone

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. Should we tolerate debate within feminism's ranks? Undebatable! But it's not so simple: women are socialised to avoid conflict; when we do differ, especially on politics and in public, it's still tediously labelled a 'catfight.'

Robin Morgan

#57. 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

#58. 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

#59. Good people can disagree - all you want is honesty, because you know, if I disagree, I'm willing to debate you on that, and then let the public decide what's good policy and bad policy.

Russell Pearce

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. 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

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. 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

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

Marvin Ammori

#67. 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

#68. 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