Debate Quotes

Take the Pyramids. Great blocks of useless masonry, put up to minister to the egoism of a despotic bloated king. Think of the sweated masses who toiled to build them and died doing it. It makes me sick to think of the suffering and torture they represent.Mrs. Allerton said cheerfully: You’d rather have no Pyramids, no Parthenon, no beautiful tombs or temples—just the solid satisfaction of knowing that people got three meals a day and died in their beds.The young man directed his scowl in her direction. I think human beings matter more than stones.

~ Agatha Christie

When it comes to moral dilemmas and matters of discerning right justice, my natural sympathy so often happens to land on the opposite end of that of most of my peers. I sometimes wonder if this is nothing more than the misguidedness and the wickedness of my own heart. I wonder other times if God wires some of us in such a way so that fair discourse might then be provided, so that honest and unbiased, due process is ultimately more likely to be carried out. Perhaps it is all necessary for variance of perception, for mindful debate: that the heart is meant to create a bit of bias on certain issues; as between one another, they weigh and balance. For not all hearts are the same.

~ Criss Jami

Don't fight to be right, but fight when you are right.

~ Amit Kalantri

Does giving your piece of mind, bring a peace of mind? Or is it better to be silent and let the war inside subside?

~ Anthony Liccione

The real battlefield is the realm of ideas.

~ Bryant Mcgill

I wish for you a more difficult life, somewhere in the complicated center, where the courage of your convictions blends with humility and respect for others.

~ Kenneth Patrick Ruscio

Practicing dialogue helps you to cultivate a realness that allows you to face reality on its own terms, not just the terms you’d like it to have in order to remain in your comfort zone.

~ Oli Anderson

Dialogue unplugs you from your own programming as you become more real, debate turns up the voltage and entrenches you more deeply.

~ Oli Anderson

Idolatry happens when you worship or praise anything excessively to the point of causing you to believe it reigns supreme. All things on this earth are temporal, even your very own desires. Be careful that you do not create idols to worship.

~ Amaka Imani Nkosazana

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

As for the majority, it is not so much race as it is political affiliation that really divides it today. What was once an issue of physical difference is now one of intellectual difference. Men have yet to master disagreeing without flashing all their frustrations that come with it; the conservative will throw half-truths while the liberal will throw insults. Combine these and what do you get? A dishonest mockery of a country.

~ Criss Jami

Killing, raping and looting have been common practices in religious societies, and often carried out with clerical sanction. The catalogue of notorious barbarities – wars and massacres, acts of terrorism, the Inquisition, the Crusades, the chopping off of thieves’ hands, the slicing off of clitorises and labia majora, the use of gang rape as punishment, and manifold other savageries committed in the name of one faith or another — attests to religion’s longstanding propensity to induce barbarity, or at the very least to give it free rein. The Bible and the Quran have served to justify these atrocities and more, with women and gay people suffering disproportionately. There is a reason the Middle Ages in Europe were long referred to as the Dark Ages; the millennium of theocratic rule that ended only with the Renaissance (that is, with Europe’s turn away from God toward humankind) was a violent time.Morality arises out of our innate desire for safety, stability and order, without which no society can function; basic moral precepts (that murder and theft are wrong, for example) antedated religion. Those who abstain from crime solely because they fear divine wrath, and not because they recognize the difference between right and wrong, are not to be lauded, much less trusted. Just which practices are moral at a given time must be a matter of rational debate. The 'master-slave' ethos – obligatory obeisance to a deity — pervading the revealed religions is inimical to such debate. We need to chart our moral course as equals, or there can be no justice.

~ Jeffrey Tayler

You change society by changing the wind. Change the wind, transform the debate, recast the discussion, alter the context in which political discussions are being made, and you will change the outcomes... You will be surprised at how fast the politicians adjust to the change in the wind.

~ Jim Wallis

The idea that you have to be protected from any kind of uncomfortable emotion is what I absolutely do not subscribe to.

~ John Cleese

Look, Aerin, preparation is only half the challenge of winning a debate.”“And the other half?”He had her now. “You have to choose the right side.”“Your side, you mean.” She bristled.“No, the losing side.”“What?”“Always choose the weaker side.”“Why would I do that?” Doubt edged her voice, but now she was sitting erect, her feet flat on the floor.“Because then you have further to go to prove your case.” He eased the feet of his chair down. “In a debate, there are two sides. If both make a good argument, then the less popular side wins because that side had further to go to prove its point. Simple logistics.”“If you don’t care which side wins.” She frowned.“It’s a debate. It doesn’t matter which side wins.”“You mean it doesn’t matter to you.” The tone in her voice unsettled him. Or maybe it was the fact that that her criticism disturbed him at all.“It’s a class,” he said. “The point is to flesh out the different sides of an argument.”“And you don’t care if the truth gets lost in the shuffle. Don’t you believe in anything?!

~ Anne Osterlund

When I find that stubbornness continually overrides common sense regardless of the logic of my argument, it seems that the only effective solution is to tell them to go ahead and stick their finger in the socket. And what I find is that what my argument failed to solve, electricity does quite nicely.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Once a person has made some sort of stable, symbolic connection between two things, the connection will influence his subsequent behavior and will generate its own 'proof.' This is why it is idle and foolish to try to 'refute' religious, political, and similar beliefs with empirical arguments about referents that are symbols to the believer but not to the non-believer.

~ Thomas Szasz

Your patterns of thought, existing bodies of knowledge, beliefs, predispositions, etc. are the 'stuff of your mental universe'. We are always subject to the power of our mental inertia. The waves in our mental oceans can never be magically stilled, and are therefore always impacting our new beliefs, even when we become scrutinizing adults. It is simply impossible to 'wipe the slate clean' and start over. These effects remain with us throughout our entire lives. Even the beliefs that we later discard are difficult to completely negate, and leave their own residual effects.

~ Daniel Ionson

Real life issues are not mathematical equations. We’re not calculators crunching numbers. We’re humans sorting through complex, multi-layered issues, and we’re doing so while enduring the (sometimes profound) personal effects of our conclusions. While we want to be reasonable, we are inexorably pulled in the direction of our oldest mental habits and by our deepest life-impacting needs. We’re repelled by those ideas which can jeopardize our comfort, safety, and happiness. We can try to be fair, but all the while we are fighting against our needs and fears. There are things we don’t want to be true (or false). Our lives are built on certain beliefs which, if disproved, could wreck us. These are the truths that we 'can’t handle'.

~ Daniel Ionson

The Existential-Epistemic Spiral—MeaningOur central beliefs shape and guide us, but the staggering synergistic power of our dynamics working together creates an existential centripetal force at the core of our being—meaning. Nothing affects us like meaning. Meaning is everything, the cumulative effect of all dynamics spinning inside of us. It generates and sustains our identity, creates stability and purpose. It drives our choices, shapes our feelings, and guides our morality.

~ Daniel Ionson

We all live within our belief solar systems; it’s how we make it through each day. What feels “real” and “true” is based on it. Internal consistency and function means that a belief solar system is simply livable, but it says nothing about its veracity.

~ Daniel Ionson

Naturally, I always place my word over anyone else's simply because I know why I said what I said.

~ Criss Jami

I believe God himself will someday debate with and answer every objection arrogant men can come up with against him; I believe he will humble us and humor himself. Know-it-alls, pseudo-intellectuals, militant anti-theists, for Christ's sake, or rather their own sake, best beware of getting roasted by their own medicine. Ah! Our delusions of trying to argue against an omniscient Creator.

~ Criss Jami

A man lives by believing something, not by debating and arguing about many things.

~ Thomas Carlyle

Lincoln had entirely outgrown juvenile delight in religious argument. Talking with God seemed to the mature Lincoln more important than talking about Him.

~ Elton Trueblood

Debate is an attempt to cling to the illusion of control provided by a point of view designed to keep the ego in place, dialogue is an attempt to dance with the unknown at the risk of losing what we think we know.

~ Oli Anderson

I am not here to merely argue about the perplexities regarding theism or philosophy, but to be a light to the world and to reach out to those who long to be a part of that light.

~ Criss Jami

n order to capture someone's attention, you must allow them to have the mental and emotional space to let you in.

~ Auliq Ice

This vacillation between assertion and denial in discussions about organised abuse can be understood as functional, in that it serves to contain the traumatic kernel at the heart of allegations of organised abuse. In his influential ‘just world’ theory, Lerner (1980) argued that emotional wellbeing is predicated on the assumption that the world is an orderly, predictable and just place in which people get what they deserve. Whilst such assumptions are objectively false, Lerner argued that individuals have considerable investment in maintaining them since they are conducive to feelings of self—efficacy and trust in others. When they encounter evidence contradicting the view that the world is just, individuals are motivated to defend this belief either by helping the victim (and thus restoring a sense of justice) or by persuading themselves that no injustice has occurred. Lerner (1980) focused on the ways in which the ‘just world’ fallacy motivates victim-blaming, but there are other defences available to bystanders who seek to dispel troubling knowledge. Organised abuse highlights the severity of sexual violence in the lives of some children and the desire of some adults to inflict considerable, and sometimes irreversible, harm upon the powerless. Such knowledge is so toxic to common presumptions about the orderly nature of society, and the generally benevolent motivations of others, that it seems as though a defensive scaffold of disbelief, minimisation and scorn has been erected to inhibit a full understanding of organised abuse. Despite these efforts, there has been a recent resurgence of interest in organised abuse and particularly ritualistic abuse (eg Sachs and Galton 2008, Epstein et al. 2011, Miller 2012).

~ Michael Salter

Some readers may find it a curious or even unscientific endeavour to craft a criminological model of organised abuse based on the testimony of survivors. One of the standard objections to qualitative research is that participants may lie or fantasise in interview, it has been suggested that adults who report severe child sexual abuse are particularly prone to such confabulation. Whilst all forms of research, whether qualitative or quantitative, may be impacted upon by memory error or false reporting. there is no evidence that qualitative research is particularly vulnerable to this, nor is there any evidence that a fantasy— or lie—prone individual would be particularly likely to volunteer for research into child sexual abuse. Research has consistently found that child abuse histories, including severe and sadistic abuse, are accurate and can be corroborated (Ross 2009, Otnow et al. 1997, Chu et al. 1999). Survivors of child abuse may struggle with amnesia and other forms of memory disturbance but the notion that they are particularly prone to suggestion and confabulation has yet to find a scientific basis. It is interesting to note that questions about the veracity of eyewitness evidence appear to be asked far more frequently in relation to sexual abuse and rape than in relation to other crimes. The research on which this book is based has been conducted with an ethical commitment to taking the lives and voices of survivors of organised abuse seriously.

~ Michael Salter

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

~ T. Baggins

Today, acknowledgement of the prevalence and harms of child sexual abuse is counterbalanced with cautionary tales about children and women who, under pressure from social workers and therapists, produce false allegations of ‘paedophile rings’, ‘cult abuse’ and ‘ritual abuse’. Child protection investigations or legal cases involving allegations of organised child sexual abuse are regularly invoked to illustrate the dangers of ‘false memories’, ‘moral panic’ and ‘community hysteria’. These cautionary tales effectively delimit the bounds of acceptable knowledge in relation to sexual abuse. They are circulated by those who locate themselves firmly within those bounds, characterising those beyond as ideologues and conspiracy theorists. However firmly these boundaries have been drawn, they have been persistently transgressed by substantiated disclosures of organised abuse that have led to child protection interventions and prosecutions. Throughout the 1990s, in a sustained effort to redraw these boundaries, investigations and prosecutions for organised abuse were widely labelled ‘miscarriages of justice’ and workers and therapists confronted with incidents of organised abuse were accused of fabricating or exaggerating the available evidence. These accusations have faded over time as evidence of organised abuse has accumulated, while investigatory procedures have become more standardised and less vulnerable to discrediting attacks. However, as the opening quotes to this introduction illustrate, the contemporary situation in relation to organised abuse is one of considerable ambiguity in which journalists and academics claim that organised abuse is a discredited ‘moral panic’ even as cases are being investigated and prosecuted.

~ Michael Salter

Allegations of multi-perpetrator and multi-victim sexual abuse emerged to public awareness in the early 1980s contemporaneously with the denials of the accused and their supporters. Multi-perpetrator sexual offences are typically more sadistic than solo offences and organised sexual abuse is no exception. Adults and children with histories of organised abuse have described lives marked by torturous and sometimes ritualistic sexual abuse arranged by family members and other care-givers and authority figures. It is widely acknowledged, at least in theory, that sexual abuse can take severe forms, but when disclosures of such abuse occur, they are routinely subject to contestation and challenge. People accused of organised, sadistic or ritualistic abuse have protested that their accusers are liars and fantasists, or else innocents led astray by overly zealous investigators. This was an argument that many journalists and academics have found more convincing than the testimony of alleged victims.

~ Michael Salter

Instead of seeing how much pain I can dish out towards those I disagree with, or who I believe have done me wrong, I seek to follow the golden rule and use my words and behavior to create more of what the world needs – love, compassion, and connection.

~ Aspen Baker

He who cannot put his thoughts on ice should not enter into the heat of dispute.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The only truths worth arguing about are those truths that could prevent or lead to circumstances that may bite us in the rear sooner or later.

~ Criss Jami

If you put it as 'complex nervous systems' it sounds pretty deflationary. What's so special about a complex nervous system? But of course, that complex nervous system allows you to do calculus. It allows you to do astrophysics… to write poetry... to fall in love. Put under that description, when asked 'What’s so special about humans...?', I’m at a loss to know how to answer that question. If you don’t see why we’d be special… because we can do poetry [and] think philosophical thoughts [and] we can think about the morality of our behavior, I’m not sure what kind of answer could possibly satisfy you at that point....I could pose the same kinds of questions of you... So God says, 'You are guys are really, really special.' How does his saying it make us special? 'But you see, he gave us a soul.' How does our having a soul make us special? Whatever answer you give, you could always say… 'What’s so special about that?

~ Shelly Kagan

People need to learn the art of making an argument. Often there is no right or wrong. It's just your opinion vs someone else's opinion. How you deliver that opinion could make the difference between opening a mind, changing an opinion or shutting the door. Sometimes folk just don't know when they've argued enough. Learn when to shut up.

~ J'son M. Lee

Our business is communication oftentimes through the medium of stories but our capacity has a far greater scope - to entertain certainly, but also to stimulate debate, to mark up changes and differences and that way, to maybe, just now and then, to change the world.

~ Sara Sheridan

The key to holding a logical argument or debate is to allow oneself to understand the other person’s argument no matter how divergent their views may seem.

~ Auliq Ice