Public debate quotes:

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I'm not getting into a public debate with Jack Nicklaus. -- Tim Finchem
In the midst of fighting there is no place for public debate. -- Yitzhak Rabin
The discourse of the West and the attitudes of its leaders are important because they influence public debate in Turkey. -- Safak Pavey
The Sophists' paradoxical talk pieces and their public debates were entertainment in 5th century Greece. And in that world, Socrates was an entertainer. -- David Antin
A politician's goal is always to manipulate public debate. I think there are some politicians with higher goals. But all of them get corrupted by power. -- Dean Koontz
The federal government seeks to control and regulate the Internet, but the last thing this Congress should be doing is trying to stifle public debate online. -- Dennis Hastert
Since we enacted the PATRIOT Act almost three years ago, there has been tremendous public debate about its breadth and implications on due process and privacy. -- Howard Berman
I think I'll always be a better playwright than a pundit, but I believe that writers should be public intellectuals and that theater, even more than film, is a place of public debate. -- Tony Kushner
Enjoy most: the prospect of having an impact on the public debate. Irritating liberals is a close second. -- Ann Coulter
Questions of absolute good and evil are much better not opened to public debate these days, when so few people are sure of their absolutes -- Sidney Howard
Is there any point in public debate in a society where hardly anyone has been taught how to think, while millions have been taught what to think? -- Peter Hitchens
That's one of the major lessons: no president should ever take this nation to war without full public debate in the Congress and/or in the public. -- Robert McNamara
It is not the principled partisan, however obnoxious he may seem to his opponents, who degrades our public debate, but the preening, self-styled statesman who elevates compromise to a first principle. -- Tom DeLay
Markets are useful instruments for organizing productive activity. But unless we want to let the market rewrite the norms that govern social institutions, we need a public debate about the moral limits of markets. -- Michael Sandel
The idea of a liberal media bias is simply a myth. If only it were true, we might have a more humane, open-minded, and ultimately effective public debate on the issues facing the country. -- Barbra Streisand
In the United States, and to only slightly lesser degree in all the other rich and economically progressive Western countries, public debate has at all times been dominated by the adherents of a "free" economy. -- Gunnar Myrdal
There is too much disagreement for disagreement's sake. In a time of persistent challenges that still call into question our most sacred aspirations as a country, we cannot afford shallow callous divisiveness in our public debate. -- Cory Booker
Nothing is more dangerous to one's own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of that faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate. -- C. S. Lewis
I almost became a political journalist, having worked as a reporter at the time of Watergate. The proximity to those events motivated me, when I wound up doing philosophy, to try to use it to move the public debate. -- Michael Sandel
A culture's ability to understand the world and itself is critical to its survival. But today we are led into the arena of public debate by seers whose main gift is their ability to compel people to continue to watch them. -- George Saunders
As a woman of a certain age - and really, ever since I hit puberty and my baby-making parts were suddenly subject to public debate - I've been told over and over again that I will 'change my mind' about not wanting kids. -- Jen Kirkman
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All murder is a tragedy but when journalists are killed, public debate loses a voice that can provide an important contribution to democracy. It is essential that governments do all they can to ensure safe conditions for journalists to carry out their work. -- Irina Bokova
The Chinese people have been forced to forget the Tiananmen massacre. There has been no public debate about the event, no official apology. The media aren't allowed to mention it. Still today people are being persecuted and imprisoned for disseminating information about it. -- Ma Jian
When governments rely increasingly on sophisticated public relations agencies, public debate disappears and is replaced by competing propaganda campaigns, with all the accompanying deceits. Advertising isn't about truth or fairness or rationality, but about mobilising deeper and more primitive layers of the human mind. -- Brian Eno
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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
I'm out there arguing the Labor case. I will do it anywhere and everywhere that I can. I do it within various communities across Australia where I am able to make a positive contribution. And let me tell you, my voice won't be silenced in the public debate because the issue at stake for Australia are so stark. -- Kevin Rudd
Succinct, thorough, and masterfully researched-Thomas Medvetz has written a subtle and timely history of these fixtures of public debate in the United States. In the realms of culture studies, policy, and policy formation, there is no book quite like Think Tanks in America. Plus which, no one has understood, interpreted, then used Pierre Bourdieu's ideas better-so well that Bourdieu himself would have been pleased. -- Charles Lemert
Mental health is often missing from public health debates even though it's critical to wellbeing. -- Diane Abbott
The job of the press is to encourage debate, not to supply the public with information. -- Christopher Lasch
The extra curricular activity in which I was most engaged - debating - helped shape my interests in public policy. -- Joseph Stiglitz
If you are prepared to run for public office, you also have to be willing to accept a debate about you. -- Wolfgang Schauble
The surveillance of ordinary people is far greater than I would have imagined and far greater than the American public has been able to debate. -- Barton Gellman
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
I have worked to expand the health care debate beyond the current for-profit system, to include a public option and an amendment to free the states to pursue single payer. -- Dennis Kucinich
Talk radio is an asset to our nation because it encourages strong and healthy debate about public policy, and there is no reason to affect that debate with government legislation. -- Tim Walberg
Another example of the educational inequality is the current debate over publicly financed school vouchers which will provide educational opportunities to a privileged handful, but deprive public schools of desperately needed resources. -- Bobby Scott
I was the candidate first time a Green or any progressive third party has ever been in a national televised debate. I was in five of them. And the response from the public was overwhelming. -- Peter Camejo
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
But the reporter has the responsibility to determine, number one, whether that is true, and number two, to make a judgment as to whether it's in the public interest and whether or not it should be part of the debate. -- Bob Schieffer
Debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust and wide-open and that...may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials. -- William J. Brennan
While people are free to draw different conclusions from the facts, there should be no debate over whether the American public is entitled to have all of the facts. -- Trey Gowdy

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