Top 100 Quotes About Debates
#1. Concern for the environment is a central tent of Islam, yet in contemporary debates over environmental issues there has been virtually no reference made to Islamic teaching
Mawil Izzi Dien
#2. The purpose of debates is to explore issues, not end them.
David Gemmell
#3. In all debates, let truth be thy aim, not victory, or an unjust interest.
William Penn
#4. There are 435 members of Congress. There's one 'Morning Joe' show. Hopefully, we can keep hammering the argument that you can disagree with other people and have debates but remain civil.
Joe Scarborough
#5. Arguments led by subjectivity are a waste of time. And, if they take place online, add to that, a waste of one's keyboard.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#6. There are plenty of dates that are dead nights that you could do. There are plenty evenings that are dead nights that you could have the debates in.
Donald Trump
#7. Democracy cannot function or survive without a sufficient medium by which citizens remain informed and engaged in public policy debates.
Nancy Snow
#8. I had hoped that the current presidential campaign debates might educate the public as to what is really involved in the ongoing controversy over campaign financing.
James L. Buckley
#9. I have a reputation for giving unpopular answers at Democratic debates. I never used marijuana. Sorry!
Joe Lieberman
#10. Arguing with a lawyer is not the hardest thing in the world; not arguing is.
Raheel Farooq
#12. World's children cannot wait any longer. While international community debates and issues recommendations, statements and fine speeches, world's children - marginalised, socially excluded, poor and vulnerable - continue to suffer.
Kailash Satyarthi
#13. There needs to be debates, like we're going through. There needs to be townhall meetings. There needs to be travel. This is a huge country.
George W. Bush
#14. We have a natural constant craving for leadership. Democracy is always a fragile and imperfect achievement. Yet a distinct feeling of malaise in our political culture lingers. There is something missing from our public debates.
Tim Soutphommasane
#15. Presidential and vice-presidential debates are not about campaign staff or consultants, and it is high time we as a people took control and reminded them and their candidates of that important fact.
Bob Barr
#16. My favorite forgotten President in American history is James Buchanan, who in defending really robust and sharp-elbowed debates said, "I like the noise of democracy. I like the sound of people in the streets making noise."
Jeff Sharlet
#17. I've been doing these conventions for 20 years, and we used to at least have debates about issues. Nothing is happening basically at this convention, other than speeches.
Susan Estrich
#18. I'm pretty good at sticking to what I know. You don't see me social commentating on health-care or presidential debates. I talk about what I know because I'm petrified of being wrong.
Gary Vaynerchuk
#19. It's too hard to present an opinion on something that's not true to who you are. It's much easier to base opinions and debates off of fact and your true heart on things. To me that just comes quite naturally, and it's also about being open to what the debate is about and hearing the other side.
Elisabeth Hasselbeck
#20. The debates of that great assembly are frequently vague and perplexed, seeming to be dragged rather than to march, to the intended goal. Something of this sort must, I think, always happen in public democratic assemblies.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#21. Cultural debates are always conflicts between orthodoxies.
Anonymous
#22. If I can get on the presidential ballot in all 50 states and be allowed into the debates, I'd not only run, I'd win.
Jesse Ventura
#23. I find it unnecessary, useless and frankly a bit unnecessary to get into all sorts of debates over President Obama's religion or the authenticity of his birth. I know for some people that it is an obsession. It is not with me.
Mike Huckabee
#24. With increasing fervor since the 1980s, sustainability has been the watchword of scientists, environmental activists, and indeed all those concerned about the complex, fragile systems on the sphere we inhabit. It has shaped debates about business, design, and our lifestyles.
Jamais Cascio
#25. The world organization debates disarmament in one room and, in the next room, moves the knights and pawns that make national arms imperative.
E.B. White
#26. It is my sincere hope that Christopher Bryson's apparently thorough and comprehensive perusal of the scientific literature on the biological actions of fluoride and the ensuing debates through the years will receive the attention it deserves and that its implications will be seriously considered.
Arvid Carlsson
#27. Our debates, for the most part, are examples unworthy of a playground: name-calling, verbal slaps, gossip, giggles, all while the swings and slides of governance remain empty.
Toni Morrison
#28. Ah, to be a conservative climate change denier. While real scientists must do all the research and engage in heated debates about just how bad things are going to be, the deniers can rest easy in the bliss of willful ignorance.
David Horsey
#29. Politics has become a game of meaningless, mindless battles, conducted by unscrupulous methods and people, designed to transform even the most serious policy debates into sport.
Al Gore
#30. I know the media likes to personalize political debates, and I know the government will demonize me.
Edward Snowden
#31. The Prime Minister wins debate after debate and loses battle after battle. The country is beginning to say that he fights debates like a war and the war like a debate.
Aneurin Bevan
#32. Culture, what you believe, what you value, how you live matters. Now, as fundamental as these principles are, they may become topics of democratic debates from time to time, so it is today with the enduring institution of marriage. Marriage is a relationship between a man and a woman.
Mitt Romney
#33. Before the Internet, we were in a different sort of dark age. We had to wait to hear news on TV at night or in print the next day. We had to go to record stores to find new music. Cocktail party debates couldn't be settled on the spot.
Marvin Ammori
#34. If, in full conversation with the biblical and extrabiblical evidence, we can adjust our expectations about how the Bible should behave, we can begin to move beyond the impasse of the liberal/conservative debates of the last several generations.
Peter Enns
#36. At these big set-piece events like the leaders' debates, that exterior of calm and serenity is nothing compared to what's going on inside most of the time.
Nicola Sturgeon
#37. The heated debates about Homo sapiens' 'natural way of life' miss the main point. Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, there hasn't been a single natural way of life for Sapiens. There are only cultural choices, from among a bewildering palette of possibilities.
Yuval Noah Harari
#38. If Abe Lincoln took part in the Republican debates, he would look out of place with his intelligence, compassion and gaping head wound.
Dana Gould
#39. Just as people gather on the road to see a fistfight, India gathers at night to watch TV debates.
Chetan Bhagat
#40. I think a lot of moral debates are not over what is the basis of justice, but who gets a ticket to play in the game.
Steven Pinker
#41. I don't remember debates. I don't think we spent a lot of time debating it. Maybe we did, but I don't remember.
George W. Bush
#42. The overarching issue, as I see it, is the elitism of America's political system; the fact that regular, ordinary Americans aren't considered in policy debates or legislation, and regularly get shafted by the powers-that-be in Washington.
Jerry Springer
#43. I'm working as hard as I can. Yesterday, I had five different debates. I don't get a half an hour a day to talk to my wife. I don't know how much harder I can work.
James P. Moran
#44. Energy has become a national security issue and as technology continues to improve, there will be more debates like the one on Keystone.
Ed Royce
#45. We will not put a lid on opinions. On the contrary, it is more important than ever that political debates are open and free, even on the most difficult issues. Especially on the most difficult issues. The task is to encourage controversial debates in a form that strengthens democracy.
Jens Stoltenberg
#46. I wish I could give you a lot of advice, based on my experience of winning political debates. But I don't have that experience. My only experience is at losing them.
Richard M. Nixon
#47. Medicare debates in Congress should result in better Medicare benefits for all our nation's seniors. We're not asking for special treatment for rural America, just a fair deal.
Bennie Thompson
#48. The author's alliterative description of politics since the 1960 presidential debates: "Government by Gotcha".
David Pietrusza
#49. In the second and third debates the jacket has a generally padded shape across a large part of the entire back which tapers inward toward the spine in a downward direction.
Robert Nelson
#50. I argue that even as the war is framed in certain ways to control and heighten affect in relation to the differential grievability of lives, so war has come to frame ways of thinking multiculturalism and debates on sexual freedom, issues largely considered separate from foreign affairs.
Judith Butler
#51. Disagreement is part of being a person who has choices. One of those choices is to respect others and engage in intelligent conversation about differences of opinion without becoming enemies, eventually allowing us to move forward to compromise.
Ben Carson
#52. You cannot simply read the Quran,not if you take it seriously.You either have surrendered to it already or you fight it.
It attacks tenaciously,directly,personally; it debates,criticizes,shames and challenges.
From the outset it draws the line of battle, and I was on other side.
Jeffrey Lang
#53. Feminists often pretend to be angry and offended in order to win debates or, I should say, prevent debates from ever happening. If you can act angry and offended, especially on a college campus, you can shut down the other side using a speech code.
Mike Adams
#54. It's interesting when you read the debates in parliaments between MPs about whether they should give women a vote. It's a lot of fear; it is fear of change. It's fear if women get to vote, family structures will break down. Women will stop having children. Women won't vote for war.
Sarah Gavron
#55. Often, preachers comment on debates Jesus had with men two thousand years ago regarding problems of that time, instead of providing answers, in the Spirit of Christ, to the problems of modern man. Therefore, many come to the conclusion that religion is irrelevant.
Richard Wurmbrand
#56. As an undergraduate at Stanford, I started 'The Stanford Review,' which ended up being very engaged in the hot debates of the time: campus speech codes, questions about diversity on campus, all sorts of debates like that.
Peter Thiel
#57. At the height of the Cold War, when Ronald Reagan was president, the Soviets and their allies and satellites did not shirk human rights debates with the West. They had their arguments ready.
Elliott Abrams
#58. Betemit's positional flexibility is the same as yours: He can stand around and muse about the great philosophical debates of our day anywhere on the field. Catching and throwing the baseball is an entirely different question.
Baseball Prospectus
#59. Children have fewer rights than almost any other group and fewer institutions protecting these rights. Consequently, their voices and needs are almost completely absent from the debates, policies, and legislative practices that are constructed in terms of their needs.
Henry A. Giroux
#60. I don't ever participate in debates about the existence or nonexistence of God because I can't imagine why anyone would be persuaded one way or the other by such things.
Susan Jacoby
#61. I think it's really unfortunate that academics have been sidelined in most important policy debates.
Juan Cole
#63. We have a choice. We can shape our future, or let events shape it for us. And if we want to succeed, we can't fall back on the stale debates and old divides that won't move us forward.
Barack Obama
#64. Having an energy conversation without talking about climate is like talking about smoking and not talking about cancer.
Chris Hayes
#65. Problem was, all this is new. In English at school we study a grammar book by a man named Ronald Rideout, read Cider with Rosie, do debates on fox-hunting and memorize 'I Must Go Down to the Seas Again' by Jason Masefield. We don't have to actually think about stuff.
David Mitchell
#66. Historians don't really like to carry on speculative debates, but you could certainly argue that the likelihood of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe was extremely, extremely low.
Aldrich Ames
#67. It's too much show business and too much prompting, too much artificiality, and not really debates. They're rehearsed appearances.
George H. W. Bush
#68. Overly focused, it's far from the time to rest now. Debates growin bout who they think is the best now
Drake
#69. [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
#70. Government has no right to make itself a party in any debates respecting the principles or mode of forming or of changing, constitutions. It is not for the benefit of those who exercise the powers of government, that constitutions, and the governments issuing from them, are established.
Thomas Paine
#71. Economists want their discipline to be a science, and they have nailed down a few precepts, but many of their debates are still clouded by ideology.
Nathan Myhrvold
#72. If we are to put an end to division, people from all political persuasions will have to stop fighting one another and seek true unity, not just a consensus that benefits one party.
Ben Carson
#73. In the world of the Middle East at the moment, the debates are shrill. But ... the wisest voice of all of them may well be the voice of this mute thing, the Cyrus cylinder.
Neil MacGregor
#74. I can't ever remember sitting around and saying, 'gosh let's hurry up and get these debates going, that'll win it for me.' Nope.
George H. W. Bush
#75. There are certainly major differences between Poland's policies and those of the old EU countries. Debates are going on in Brussels over a shared foreign policy and even a shared foreign minister.
Lech Kaczynski
#76. Debates educated a nation. That educative function had atrophied during decades of making decisions behind closed doors.
Robert A. Caro
#77. To pull off successful attacks in debates, you have to execute with nuance and subtlety. It has to be artful.
Mark McKinnon
#78. The arts are an even better barometer of what is happening in our world than the stock market or the debates in congress.
Hendrik Willem Van Loon
#79. - Beclouded The sky is low, the clouds are mean, A travelling flake of snow Across a barn or through a rut Debates if it will go. A narrow wind complains all day How some one treated him; Nature, like us, is sometimes caught Without her diadem.
William Wordsworth
#80. We encounter very healthy boardroom debates and pretty diverse views, so we have always had the benefit of diversity of opinion and expression before we take some important calls.
Uday Kotak
#81. Mental health is often missing from public health debates even though it's critical to wellbeing.
Diane Abbott
#82. If you are a conservative you can never get anything wrong. I was very proud of the fact that I didn't get anything wrong that I said during the course of the debates.
Michele Bachmann
#83. The National Security Adviser is supposed to be an arbiter of policy and open minded in internal debates. But the playing field was never balanced. It was always tilted toward Rumsfeld's position, which is obviously the same as Bush's.
Seymour Hersh
#84. In my downtime, for fun, I engage in philosophical internet debates. Yeah, I'm that guy.
Scott Clifton
#85. I have always thought that all philosophical debates are ultimately between the partisans of structure and the partisans of goo.
Alan W. Watts
#86. During the Cold War, America took sides not only in disputes between Arab countries, but also in debates within them.
Stephen Kinzer
#87. I know it sounds trite but I wanted to make a difference. Political debates with my father had been fraught because he was uncompromising and explosive but if he taught me one thing it was to air my views.
Vince Cable
#88. "Win" is about the specific use of specific words to connect you to your employer or employees, politicians to voters - and frankly, to help people win debates, have discussions, and improve the level of communication.
Frank Luntz
#89. Imams must ridicule Caliphate fantasies. Exchange programmes between Muslim-only schools and non-Muslim-majority schools should be initiated. Community-based debates around these themes must no longer be shut down from fear of offence.
Maajid Nawaz
#90. I don't mind the debates, they're good for America, but we shouldn't be out there attacking each other all the time.
William J. Clinton
#91. Like most so-called debates between liberals and conservatives, they weren't interested in listening or responding to each other. They were solely concerned with making sound bites.
Bob Frey
#92. I don't think they should be against the NFL because the NFL, those are two big games. I don't think it would be good for the NFL and I don't think it would be good for the debates.
Donald Trump
#93. I stated at Justice [John] Roberts' hearing, the court's injected itself into many of the political debates of our day.
Sam Brownback
#94. Some felt as if 'Charlie Hebdo' was obsessed with its 'Screw Allah' stance. It's a sort of provocation that caused a lot of debates.
Patrick Chappatte
#95. It is important that the decorum and dignity of the House is upheld at all times. The image of Parliament in the public mind should be one where proceedings, debates and discussions take place with a view to resolve issues through a constructive and co-operative approach.
Pratibha Patil
#96. No state, as a matter of public policy, should turn back the clock on progress by, in effect, legalizing and relitigating the same types of discriminatory laws and debates that took America centuries to overcome.
Dannel Malloy
#97. It is sad that while science moves ahead in exciting new areas of research, fine-tuning our knowledge of how life originated and evolved, creationists remain mired in medieval debates about angels on the head of a pin and animals in the belly of an Ark.
Michael Shermer
#98. When I listen to the public debates about climate change, I am impressed by the enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of our observations and the superficiality of our theories.
Freeman Dyson
#99. Well, I think the way to go is civil unions. But I do think when you talk about the Republican Party and the debates that are going on within the Republican Party on a number of issues, what I'm hoping is that they will get to a point where they will work with us on moving forward with this economy.
Amy Klobuchar
#100. Acceptance speeches can make or break presidential candidacies. It was Al Gore's 2000 acceptance speech that relaunched his candidacy and nearly saved him. John Kerry's speech and overall ineffective convention nearly sank him in 2004 (though he was almost saved by the debates).
Chuck Todd
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