Quotes About Public Discourse

#1. And yet, on balance, affirmative action has, I think, been a qualified success." A 13-word sentence with five hedging words. I give it first prize as the most wishy-washy sentence in modern public discourse,

William Zinsser

#2. What worries me," he adds, "is that this circus-like atmosphere may have scared off many young scientists. It actually has a chilling effect. It prevents scientists from participating in the public discourse, because they fear they, or their department head, will be threatened.

Jane Mayer

#3. I hold to the idea that civility, understood as the willingness to engage in public discourse, is the first virtue of citizens.

Mark Kingwell

#4. You learn in America to speak two ways. You learn in public discourse not to be very specific about your religious life. Or, if we talk about it, we'll find a secular way of doing it that will not be offensive to people of non-belief. So, that you go through life with these alternate voices.

Richard Rodriguez

#5. Public discourse requires making an argument for a point of view, not having an argument - as in having a fight.

Deborah Tannen

#6. Public discourse about climate change has resulted in the erroneous idea that it's all about cost, burden and sacrifice. If the math was correct, everyone would see it's about profit, jobs and competitive advantage.

Amory Lovins

#7. I think it is very difficult today to have a reasoned public discourse on any controversial subject. Certainly, election years present a complicating factor.

John Poindexter

#8. As the growing emphasis on feelings crowds out reason, facts will play a smaller role in public discourse.

Paul Craig Roberts

#9. By now, sympathy for the plight of the polar bears had largely disappeared from public discourse. Instead of beautiful mammals deserving of out preservation efforts, they came to be known as a marauding horde of beasts surfing a climatic anomaly that was laying waste to Canada.

Ryan Boudinot

#10. It matters because the emerging civic structures and spatial arrangements of the digital era will profoundly affect our access to economic opportunities and public services, the character and content of public discourse,

William J. Mitchell

#11. For the sake of public discourse, for the demands of the free market, and for the value we place in citizen advocacy, Rush Limbaugh must go.

Christine Pelosi

#12. I'd like to see much more understanding of emotional issues around hurt, abandonment, disappointment, longing, failure and shame, where they stem from and how they drive people and policies brought into public discourse.

Susie Orbach

#13. The world of public discourse - political, social, diplomatic, commercial - has so corrupted language that we are rightly more suspicious of the meaning of words than we are convinced of their veracity. Language has been turned on its head.

Deena Metzger

#14. Our culture's tolerance wears thin when religion intrudes on the public discourse ... Our schools, courtrooms, and libraries set the tone for the entire society. The message they currently communicate is harsh and unambiguous: religion is offensive and should be kept out of public view.

Ralph E. Reed Jr.

#15. At least in the West, politicians, corporations and media moguls can no longer take for granted their power to control the public discourse - and have it go unchallenged.

David Puttnam

#16. Our public discourse appears permanently riven by conspiracy theories.

Sam Harris

#17. The focus of our public discourse has been on how American companies are competing with Japanese, German, and other foreign companies. What this allows us to ignore is how each of those American companies is really in competition with the families of the workers. That's the real competition.

Arlie Russell Hochschild

#18. Secularists are often wrongly accused of trying to purge religious ideals from public discourse. We simply want to deny them public sponsorship.

Wendy Kaminer

#19. Atheists have just as much of a right to the public discourse as any ... people of any religious faith in this country.

Al Gore

#20. I don't believe that there's such a thing as objectivity in much of journalism, but I think there is a serious effort to and a regard for facts and into taking that stuff seriously is very important to the public discourse and it's very important to democracy.

Jann Wenner

#21. The process of driving a wedge between sacred and secular history is called secularization...the eventual result of this process is that belief in God is relegated to nothing more than a "personal belief" that has no standing in public discourse.

Stephen Leston

#22. Sermons remain one of the last forms of public discourse where it is culturally forbidden to talk back.

Harvey Cox

#23. Spokespeople sell women the Iron Maiden and name her "Health": if public discourse were really concerned with women's health, it would turn angrily upon this aspect of the beauty myth.

Naomi Wolf

#24. If bloggers are to improve our public discourse - helping busy and usually uninformed people make sense of the world - it is necessary to use some sort of standard with which to judge their reliability. Perhaps the answer (strictly advisory) is a body of their peers. Perhaps not.

Eric Alterman

#25. The failures of the press have contributed immensely to the emergence of a talk-show nation, in which public discourse is reduced to ranting and raving and posturing. We now have a mainstream press whose news agenda is increasingly influenced by this netherworld.

Carl Bernstein

#26. I am comfortable with my level of public discourse.

Neil Armstrong

#27. 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

#28. Proponents of so-called pluralism feel compelled to ban religious considerations from public discourse because they know, instinctively if not intellectually, that their faith is in direct conflict with the God of the Bible, and that in the end the two positions are irreconcilable.

Benjamin Hart

#29. This was a good example of the fascist policing of public discourse in this country by nominal liberals who have become as unthinkingly wedded to dogma as any junior member of the Spanish Inquisition.

Camille Paglia

#30. I have and I will always work to promote a civil public discourse.

Bob Etheridge

#31. It's our tendency to approach every problem as if it were a fight between two sides. We see it in headlines that are always using metaphors for war. It's a general atmosphere of animosity and contention that has taken over our public discourse.

Deborah Tannen

#32. We have to do a better job at the work of anthropology if we hope to maintain our role in the public discourse.

Christopher W. Brooks

#33. Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse.

Cornel West

#34. The willingness to reexamine lifelong beliefs because of conflicting data takes enormous courage, and contrasts sharply with recent examples of public discourse in which our political, cultural, and religious leaders have fit data to preconceived theories.

Donal O'Shea

#35. Public discourse has been polluted now for decades by corporate-funded disinformation - not just with climate change but with a host of health, environmental and societal threats. The implications for the planet are grim.

Michael E. Mann

#36. The language we share is at the core of our identity as citizens, and our ticket to full participation in American political life. We can speak any language we want at the dinner table, but English is the language of public discourse, or the marketplace and of the voting booth.

S.I. Hayakawa

#37. Proposition 19 already is a winner no matter what happens on election day. The mere fact of its being on the ballot has elevated and legitimized public discourse about marijuana and marijuana policy in ways I could not have imagined a year ago.

George Soros

#38. Not only our political system is broken, but how we do business and have public discourse with one another. The system in Hollywood, specifically, is not depicting people of color; we're not even talking about Asian Americans or Latino Americans; we're not even getting into that question.

Isaiah Washington

#39. 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

#40. In America, we don't, in daily discourse, use the words 'capitalism' or 'socialism.' They've been kind of nonexistent words, I would say, amongst the general public.

Michael Moore

#41. Words are mostly used to keep us asleep, not to wake us.

Richard Flanagan

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

Safak Pavey

#43. Greeks are born talkers," wrote Harriet. The deputies were no exception, with or without their twirling conversation beads. They seldom used notes, at times she wished they had; a few facts and figures would have been a relief from the sweeping statements.

Mary Allsebrook

#44. Neoliberalism considers the discourse of equality, justice, and democracy quaint, if not dangerous and must be either trivialized, turned into its Orwellian opposite, or eviscerated from public life.

Henry Giroux

#45. 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

#46. The battle for public support for the wars was played out through a combination of the liberal 'feminist' discourse of rights and the hawkish premise that only carpet-bombing the oppressive enemy could solve the problem.

Nina Power

#47. Debates educated a nation. That educative function had atrophied during decades of making decisions behind closed doors.

Robert A. Caro

#48. What if, despite all our pretense and disguise, it was necessary to appear in public with the person we loved most of all? Imagine this a prerequisite for social discourse on Earth.

Carl Sagan

#49. Actual human discourse happens within a number of contexts, not in some sort of unified public forum.

Rowan Williams

#50. Now if you have proofs to bring forward, bring them forward, and your moral discourse as well; if you have no enthymemes, then fall back upon moral discourse: after all, it is more fitting for a good man to display himself as an honest fellow than as a subtle reasoner.

Aristotle.

#51. The ruler who is good for anything ought not to beg his subjects to be ruled by him, although the present governors of mankind are of a different stamp.

Plato

#52. Two truths are all too often overshadowed in today's political discourse: Public service is a most honorable pursuit, and so is bipartisanship.

Olympia Snowe

#53. 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