Public Discussion Quotes

#1. Would I be happy just practicing law? No. Would I be happy just doing TV and speeches? No. I want to do all of these things and be as active as I can ... but my main goal is to have some degree of influence on the public discussion.

Ed Rendell

#2. I think it's very important to have a public discussion about why we're denying our soldiers the ability to exercise their Second Amendment rights.

Ted Cruz

#3. Human and moral factors must always be considered. They must never be missing from policies and from public discussion.

Herman Kahn

#4. Yet the effort to inform the public also encouraged responsible public discussion that succeeded in developing a consensus for the measured approach that many scientists supported.

Paul Berg

#5. Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the battle field.

James A. Baldwin

#6. the proper way to elicit information from a group is not by starting with a public discussion but by confidentially collecting each person's judgment. This procedure makes better use of the knowledge available to members of the group than the common practice of open discussion.

Daniel Kahneman

#7. Machiavelli's teaching would hardly have stood the test of Parliamentary government, for public discussion demands at least the profession of good faith.

Lord Acton

#8. When it comes to family policies, you are dealing with very private issues. Still, my husband and I decided that we didn't want to make our private lives a matter of public discussion.

Kristina Schroder

#9. Why does a public discussion of economic policy so often show the abysmal ignorance of the participants?

Robert Solow

#10. Many Americans do not understand why we are regarded with such suspicion by so many others around the world and the anger of the moment makes public discussion of central problems frequently intemperate.

Francis George

#11. Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion; they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner

H.L. Mencken

#12. We can't be anti-everything - we need an energy plan that adds up. But there's a lack of numeracy in the public discussion of energy. Where people do use numbers, they select them to sound big and score points in arguments, rather than to aid thoughtful discussion.

David J. C. MacKay

#13. It is easy to forget, since the Catholic Church is now the only large American religious denomination whose ecclesiastical hierarchy continues to oppose birth control, that only a century ago the leaders of nearly all churches were united in their resistance to any public discussion of the subject.

Susan Jacoby

#14. Artists are valuable to public discussion: They show the correlation between doing and thinking.

Olafur Eliasson

#15. However ignorant a person may be, he or she can always moralize. And it is the propensity to moralize that takes up most of the space for public discussion in contemporary democracy.

Kenneth Minogue

#16. Throughout Ronnie's presidency, there was an ongoing public discussion as to how much influence the first lady should have on the president. It's hardly a new problem. As long as mankind has lived in groups, there's always been a question of how to handle the boss's wife.

Nancy Reagan

#17. REVOLUTION, n. A bursting of the boilers which usually takes place when the safety valve of public discussion is closed.

Ambrose Bierce

#18. In our era of celebrity, where every life is made public through email, blogs and Facebook, one of the greatest oddities may be that there is not a livelier discussion about the individual's basic need for a more private space.

Lily Koppel

#19. The public character of every public servant is legitimate subject of discussion, and his fitness or unfitness for office may be fairly canvassed by any person.

Charles Babbage

#20. The process for producing public policy in Congress is flawed. The process itself kills policy ideas through the bypassing of the rules and procedural decisions that limit discussion.

Dan Webster

#21. Avoid any specific discussion of public policy at public meetings.

Quintus Tullius Cicero

#22. The public mind has by now so thoroughly grown out of humor with it as to make condemnation of capitalism and all its works a foregone conclusion
almost a requirement of the etiquette of discussion.

Joseph Alois Schumpeter

#23. We twentieth-century Christians have chosen the way of compromise. We withdraw our Christian consciousness from the fields of public, commercial, and social life. When we enter these fields we are compelled to accept, for purposes of discussion, the secular frame of reference.

Harry Blamires

#24. Open discussion of many major public questions has for some time now been taboo. We can't open our mouths without being denounced as racists, misogynists, supremacists, imperialists or fascists. As for the media, they stand ready to trash anyone so designated.

Saul Bellow

#25. For the purposes of this paper and discussion, I will equate public service with 'public interest' and 'public welfare', which seem to me to be virtually synonymous (Nockels, 1930).

Anonymous

#26. When the Senate ceases to engage nominees in meaningful discussion of legal issues, the confirmation process takes on an air of vacuity and farce, and the Senate becomes incapable of either properly evaluating nominees or appropriately educating the public.

Elena Kagan

#27. 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

#28. On the subject of the nature of the gods, the first question is Do the gods exist or do the not? It is difficult you may say to deny that they exist. I would agree if we were arguing the matter in a public assembly, but in a private discussion of this kind, it is perfectly easy to do so.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

#29. The whole land seems aroused to discussion on the province of woman, and I am glad of it. We are willing to bear the brunt of thestorm, if we can only be the means of making a break in that wall of public opinion which lies right in the way of woman's rights, true dignity, honor and usefulness.

Angelina Grimke

#30. 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

#31. The discussion about energy options tends to be an intensely emotional, polarised, mistrustful, and destructive one. Every option is strongly opposed: the public seem to be anti-wind, anti-coal, anti-waste-to-energy, anti-tidal-barrages, anti-carbon-tax, and anti-nuclear.

David J. C. MacKay

#32. I find this in all these places I've been travelling - from India to China, to Japan and Europe and to Brazil - there is a frustration with the terms of public discourse, with a kind of absence of discussion of questions of justice and ethics and of values.

Michael Sandel

#33. I also believe that if we're serious about change, we need to have a real discussion about public financing for congressional elections.

Barack Obama

#34. Electing pro-choice Republican women can help foster a discussion that reflects the full spectrum of views and can lead to a more balanced and responsible public dialogue.

Linda Lingle

#35. As long as there are human rights to be defended; as long as there are great interests to be guarded; as long as the welfare of nations is a matter for discussion, so long will public speaking have its place.

William Jennings Bryan

#36. 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

#37. I guess nobody assumes anybody is a libertarian. It's a more complex political discussion than most people are used to, to explain why you think the way you do about public education or drug laws, and why it's not as simple as being for or against something.

Dave Barry