Quotes About Debates

#1. Working on 'Parks' was like heaven because everyone there was just intimidatingly intelligent and funny, and we would have these hilarious debates about really tangential things. It was inspiring because I felt really challenged to be my best.

Chelsea Peretti

#2. I've always been very wary of debates involving women.

Tony Abbott

#3. The friends of Galtieri, Saddam Hussein, Mullah Omar and Milosevic make unconvincing defenders of humanitarian values, and it can be seen that their inept and sometimes inane arguments lack either the principles or the seriousness that are required in such debates.

Christopher Hitchens

#4. Debates are boring.

Mario Cuomo

#5. Our political debates today are corrosive and not reflective of the belief that Abe Lincoln espoused back in his day: that we are a great country because we are a good country.

Jon Huntsman Jr.

#6. In his early days at University, he'd been too green to realize winning debates, even private ones, would lose him friends.

T. Baggins

#7. I can tell you is all nine of the people here [ on debates] would make an infinitely better commander in chief than Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.

Ted Cruz

#8. That a literature in our time is living is shown in that way that it debates problems.

Georg Brandes

#9. The question is whether we're ready to undertake responsibility for overcoming the crisis or will again sink in debates, mutual recriminations and half-steps

Yevgeny Primakov

#10. Presidential primary debates are an important part of our political process. But the media has wrested complete control from the parties and candidates over everything, including the number, the format, the qualifications, and the moderators. And they've become a circus.

Mark McKinnon

#11. I can't wait for the Republican debates to start and there's literally 65 guys on one stage.

Conan O'Brien

#12. 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

#13. Trees are right at the heart of all the necessary debates: ecological, social, economic, political, moral, religious.

Colin Tudge

#14. Unfortunately, public debates do not have much room for subtlety. The audience wants a quick thrust at your opponent, not a slow and convoluted series of moves. Whenever Obama uses subtleties in discussing a complex issue, he gets creamed.

Alan Lightman

#15. Throughout chess history, great debates have raged about the pros and cons of hanging pawns. The debates are nonsense; the answer is cut and dried. If the pawns can be attacked and forced to move forward, they are weak. If they can be defended and remain where they are, they are strong.

Yasser Seirawan

#16. The Commission on Presidential Debates must be replaced if we want to have a democracy in this country.

John B. Anderson

#17. Political institutions are fair game in political debates in a democracy. Nothing is more fair game, in fact, than political matters of public concern.

Marvin Ammori

#18. Al Gore adopted three utterly different personas in three national presidential debates.

Rich Lowry

#19. I never listen to debates. They are dreadful things indeed. The plain truth is that I am not a fair man, and don't want to hear both sides. On all known subjects, ranging from aviation to xylophone-playing, I have fixed and invariable ideas. They have not changed since I was four or five.

H.L. Mencken

#20. What intrigued me most was not the technology as such but the questions about the human goods, the fundamental human values and virtues that are raised by debates over biotechnology.

Michael Sandel

#21. The debates are part of the unconscionable fraud that our political campaigns have become a format that defies meaningful discourse. They should be charged with sabotaging the electoral process.

Walter Cronkite

#22. Debates conceal rather than reveal the truth. Truth is revealed in solitude.

Leo Tolstoy

#23. Build an "inclusive narrative" that goes beyond race, class, religion, etc., so that all may participate in the "the great debates".

Neil Postman

#24. Dialogue means debates and everyone's point of view.

Kevin Hart

#25. To be sure, debates will linger about whether Medicare is too large or too small. Debates remain about the allocation of Medicare dollars. But December 8, 2003, demonstrated that there is no debate about this most fundamental fact: Medicare must survive.

Michael Johns

#26. I have many debates now with friends on the changes, and the continuing confusion over bringing up your children, instilling values, letting them make the right choices.

Olivia Williams

#27. Today, however, we have to realize that a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.

Pope Francis

#28. The Executive has got to have a freer hand and be able to move quick in an emergency, and not be tied down by a lot of dumb shyster-lawyer congressmen taking months to shoot off their mouths in debates.

Sinclair Lewis

#29. I'm ready to be insulted as being insufficiently democratic, but I want to be serious ... I am for secret, dark debates

Jean-Claude Juncker

#30. I talk about race a lot. It's been my work ever since I came out of acting school. But it's true that in a way talking about race is a taboo. Because so many of our debates about race have to do not with race but with what we are willing to see, what we will not see and what we don't want to see.

Anna Deavere Smith

#31. The whole gun debate needs to be infused with a discussion about manhood. It's frustrating to hear debates about gun rights vs. gun control, and yet very few people say what's hidden in plain sight: It's really a contest of meanings about manhood.

Jackson Katz

#32. In my humble opinion, those who come to engage in debates of consequence, and who challenge accepted wisdom, should expect to be treated badly. Nonetheless, they must stand undaunted. That is required. And that should be expected. For it is bravery that is required to secure freedom.

Clarence Thomas

#33. In my books I might hold the mirror to my own face. If others would like to borrow the mirror, they're welcome. The books aren't there to accuse others - merely to raise issues and keep the debates alive.

John Scott

#34. One of the most critical strengths of a superior competitor in any discipline - whether we are speaking about sports, business negotiations, or even presidential debates - is the ability to dictate the tone of the battle.

Josh Waitzkin

#35. Even now, hearing the debates about Medicaid, the suggestion that somehow we could save money by cutting Medicaid strikes a chord in me personally. It seems there are some other ways we can save money rather than making it harder for people like my aunt to get health care.

Josh Earnest

#36. Keynes vs Hayek? Friedman vs Krugman? Those are the wrong intellectual debates. Its you vs. Tony Hayward, BP CEO, You vs. Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs CEO. And you are losing ...

Barry Ritholtz

#37. I think it's important that campaigns be aired all the way through, that people aren't voting three weeks before, before debates are held.

Judy Woodruff

#38. My political career goes back to the '60s and those were times of vigorous debates.

Dennis Kucinich

#39. Debates go on to this day about what caused the Great Depression. Economics is not very good at explaining swings in economic activity.

Eugene Fama

#40. I saw, he was in a different league on a different planet. Everybody says we need substance in these debates, you've got it. You've got it from [Ted] Cruz.

Rush Limbaugh

#41. While we're having all these debates about how the book is being destroyed by the Kindle, we have to remember that narrative will not be affected at all because it's part of our makeup as a creature on this planet.

Jim Crace

#42. No more debates disturbed his mind. He knew all the arguments of despair and would not listen to them. His will was set, and only death would break it.

J.R.R. Tolkien

#43. What passes for political realism may make for lively academic debates. But it often functions, ironically, as a tool of social control, rendering us passive with an analysis that overwhelms and paralyzes us.

Parker Palmer

#44. The connections I draw between human nature and political systems in my new book, for example, were prefigured in the debates during the Enlightenment and during the framing of the American Constitution.

Steven Pinker

#45. Science cannot resolve moral conflicts, but it can help to more accurately frame the debates about those conflicts.

Heinz R. Pagels

#46. In the great debates of early-nineteenth century geology, catastrophists followed the stereotypical method of objective science-empirical literalism. They believed what they saw, interpolated nothing, and read the record of the rocks directly.

Stephen Jay Gould

#47. For all its faults, it is partisanship - based on core principles- that clarifies our debates, that prevents one party from straying too far from the mainstream and that constantly refreshes our politics with new ideas and new leaders.

Tom DeLay

#48. With the presidential debates right around the corner, John Kerry is going to play Mitt Romney to help the President prepare for the debates. That's kind of a stretch; a rich white guy from Massachusetts playing a rich white guy from Massachusetts.

Jay Leno

#49. Polemical debates happen all the time in France.

Michel Houellebecq

#50. I was surprised how relevant the Moses story was to contemporary American debates - from our ongoing debate about values, to our role as champions of freedom, to our place as a country that welcome immigrants.

Bruce Feiler

#51. I'd like political candidates to present their prep plans for the zombie apocalypse, or for the robot revolution, or for when the Internet becomes self-aware, because at least then the debates would be more interesting.

Jenny Lawson

#52. I think three debates [primary debates] is the right number. I think that, uh, they'll be extremely well watched. There are those who will say it will be one of the highest-rated shows in television history, if not the highest.

Donald Trump

#53. The United States is in the midst of many spirited political debates about national priorities and public spending ... However, we have found that science is an area where both political parties can find common ground, and in which political change does not necessarily create discontinuities.

John Gibbons

#54. If Allah wants for a people ill, he gives them debates and takes away from them actions.

Umar

#55. In all intellectual debates, both sides tend to be correct in what they affirm, and wrong in what they deny.

John Stuart Mill

#56. Such an emphasis on the immanence of God as Creator in, with, and under the natural processes of the world unveiled by the sciences is certainly in accord with all that the sciences have revealed since those debates of the nineteenth century.

Arthur Peacocke

#57. So, we're well aware of the questions that our audience is inevitably going to ask. We're well aware of how carefully they watch the show and hold us to continuity. We're certainly aware of the debates that are going to occur.

Jeff Pinkner

#58. I think we need to price carbon; there's no question about it. The way we do it needs to be based on science and not political debates and attacks, and that's why I'm drawing on experts and best practices from around the world.

Justin Trudeau

#59. While floor statements from today's [congressional] representatives are typically delivered to empty galleries and published into unread oblivion, legislative debates in the Reconstruction era were widely disseminated and closely observed.

Andrew Buttaro

#60. These esoteric, intellectual debates-I want them to come to New Jersey and sit across from the widows and the orphans and have that conversation,

Chris Christie

#61. If there was one fact that sent me hurtling off to write 'Politics Lost,' it was when I learned that John Kerry had focus-grouped Abu Ghraib. We knew about the Justice Department memo in June of 2004, and Kerry didn't raise that in any one of his three debates with George Bush.

Joe Klein

#62. Ever since the field of biology emerged in the United States and Europe at the start of the nineteenth century, it has been bound up in debates over sexual, racial, and national politics. And as our social viewpoints have shifted, so has the science of the body.

Anne Fausto-Sterling

#63. Throw away the newspapers. Discard all the useless debates and gossiping. Start working in silence. Start working on your passion. And make the news yourself.

Abhijit Naskar

#64. The discussions in our house at Hachsharah were so intense that nobody could convince the other side that their position was in error - just like all political debates before and since.

Jack Prins

#65. Ambitious and thought-provoking, Higher Education in America represents an informed and informative addition to ongoing debates at the national, state, and institutional levels about the aims higher education ought to aspire to and how best to achieve them.

David M. Brown

#66. The debate that has been conducted in terms of "creation versus evolution" has gotten caught up with all kinds of other debates, and this has provided a singularly unhelpful backdrop to the would-be serious discussion of other parts of the Bible.

N. T. Wright

#67. Progress does not compel us to settle centuries-old debates about the role of government for all time - but it does require us to act in our time,

Barack Obama

#68. 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

#69. When you campaign and have to participate in so many debates just to the win the nomination of your party, you've had a lot of practice. You get to figure out as you go from one debate to another where you made your mistakes. By the time you get to the big debate you're pretty polished.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

#70. You well know, sir, that when the Constitution was submitted to the People of the respective States for their adoption or rejection, it awakened the warmest debates of the several State conventions.

Caleb Cushing

#71. I'm not scared of diversity. We have to have debates and win the argument, and if there are amendments that need to be brought up so we find out where the party is, so be it.

Jason Chaffetz

#72. Moreover, environmental health at the local level has become narrowly focused, very much defined around regulations and the attendant regulatory debates.

Samuel Wilson

#73. 'Doctor Who' is, unavoidably, a product of mid-twentieth-century debates about Britain's role in the world as its empire unravelled.

Jill Lepore

#74. The minds of youth are perpetually led to the history of Greece and Rime or to Great Britain; Boys are constantly repeating the declamations of Demosthenes and Cicero, or debates upon some political question in the British Parliament.

Noah Webster

#75. I want to create the largest archive of great God debates in existence: a Web site that becomes a great resource for both Christians and atheists.

Dinesh D'Souza

#76. I love having debates with people when they are debates but some people, you just can't. Some people shouldn't be given the oxygen.

Russell T. Davies

#77. The populations of Central America are very, very small indeed, so that while no one was denying and this was one of the great debates we used to have, whose fault was it that there were communists were able to do so well down there, well, that wasn't the point.

John Negroponte

#78. Until the late-nineteenth-century the House of Commons maintained a formal ban on the reporting of its debates.

Clive Ponting

#79. 'Orphan Black' allows for people to have debates and theories and allegiances to different characters - to trust characters and hate other characters - but it doesn't tell you who is good or bad or right or wrong. That's the most exciting storytelling, in my book.

Tatiana Maslany

#80. Debates require a lot of hard work and preparation. If you try to wing it, it shows.

Mark McKinnon

#81. I worry about how aggressive and vicious our discourse has become. I don't think all is lost, however. I believe that there are ways that we can get our public debates back on track, because civility and manners are a matter of choice.

Dana Perino

#82. I remember that my mom, my dad and I would play different roles in mock debates, where one of us would be the moderator, one of us would be my dad - frequently not my dad - and then one of us would play his opponent.

Chelsea Clinton

#83. I had the good fortune to spend hours with my parents around the dinner table having debates on politics and economics.

Dambisa Moyo

#84. Just as I wouldn't expect a gynecologist to have a debate with somebody who believes in the Stork-theory of reproduction, I won't do debates with Young Earth creationists.

Richard Dawkins

#85. You know a person is teaching the truth when no one debates it." ~ Amunhotep El Bey

Amunhotep El Bey

#86. The problem is that we won't ever know that, and a lack of data never wins debates.

David Weber

#87. Songwriting is a give-and-take process, and it can lead to some good, healthy debates.

Richie Sambora

#88. The most startling aspect of the nutrition situation in India is that it is not much of an issue in public debates and electoral politics.

Jean Dreze

#89. Meanings with no purpose are useful for meaningless debates on what the "meaner" meant. And that's what #politics is all about - misreading.

Will Advise

#90. In general, I found that the more that debates can be about facts and data, the more likely government is to make sound decisions that benefit innovators and the American people.

Julius Genachowski

#91. Choice of evils debates always produce extremism - people choose what they hope is the lesser evil, then call it good and demonize the other choice. It will be a challenge for your generation to synthesize - to move beyond Us versus Them, to We.

Margaret Atwood

#92. I agree that the two-party system stomps on any kind of competition. A great first step is to open the presidential debates to all qualified candidates, including the Libertarians. If that happens, the Libertarian party will experience unprecedented growth.

Gary Johnson

#93. I negotiated the proper timing and other things having to do with one of our other debates.

Donald Trump

#94. There is nothing wrong with intellectual differences flowing from freedom of thought as long as such differences remain confined to intellectual debates.

Pervez Musharraf

#95. Television has accustomed us to brief, intimate, telegraphic, visual, narrative messages. Candidates are learning to act, speak, and think in television's terms. In the process they are transforming speeches, debates, and their appearances in news into ads.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson

#96. We talked about politics constantly in my family growing up in North Carolina. There were always debates. Being of Greek background, it's in our blood to drink coffee and talk politics.

Zach Galifianakis

#97. Sandel hankers for the muscular debates of yesteryear, when government was not big but had bigger ambitions than today's bland Leviathan has.

George F. Will

#98. Animism is worth considering (a) because it exists, (b) because it addresses contemporary issues and debates, and (c) because it clarifies, in various ways, the argument that the project of modernity is ill-conceived and dangerously performed.

Graham Harvey

#99. For the most part, I've sat on the sidelines over the years during the endless debates about how we need to do more to encourage more women to start companies.

Michael Arrington

#100. I started working at Focus on the Family doing debates and media and cultural studies.

John Eldredge