The ability to engage in reasoned discourse, even when you passionately disagree with someone, is the hallmark of a civilized society. — Bret Weinstein
Contention is inseparable from creating knowledge. It is not contention we should try to avoid, but discourses that attempt to suppress contention. — Joyce Appleby
The electorate is starved for honest debate and for the good governance that follows from it. — Bret Weinstein
Democracy is interactive... Its a constant job of information, education, explanation, listening, and interactive communication. — Dick Gephardt
Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being. — Hannah Arendt
An informed citizenry is at the heart of a dynamic democracy. — Thomas Jefferson
Publicity, discussion, and agitation are necessary to accomplish any work of lasting benefit. — Robert M. La Follette, Sr.
Debate and divergence of views can only enrich our history and culture. — Ibrahim Babangida
Discussion is an exchange of knowledge; an argument an exchange of ignorance. — Robert Quillen
When free discussion is denied, hardening of the arteries of democracy has set in, free institutions are but a lifeless form, and the death of the republic is at hand. — William Randolph Hearst
Appeal must be to an informed, civically militant electorate. — Felix Frankfurter
Where wise actions are the fruit of life, wise discourse is the pollination. — Bryant H. McGill
Instead of looking on discussion as a stumbling block in the way of action, we think it an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all. — Pericles
Short Public Discourse Quotes
Criticism should be a casual conversation. — W. H. Auden
A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself. — Arthur Miller
An informed citizenry is the only true repository of the public will. — Thomas Jefferson
Bring it on. Dissent is central to any democracy. — Harry Belafonte
Having a good discussion is like having riches. — African Proverbs
Public Discourse Image Quotes
People who complain in private want an answer. People who complain in public want an audience.
Political Discourse Quotes
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
One-dimensional thought is systematically promoted by the makers of politics and their purveyors of mass information. Their universe of discourse is populated by self-validating hypotheses which, incessantly and monopolistically repeated, become hyponotic definitions of dictations. — Herbert Marcuse
In our national discourse and in pursuing our national agenda, we must never leave anyone behind. We must reach out to the many who may have been disaffected and left confused by political games, deceit and showmanship. The people first must transcend every level of society. — Najib Razak
Be the same person privately, publicly and personally.
Kindly politeness is the slow fruit of advanced reflection; it is a sort of humanity and kindliness applied to small acts and every day discourse: it bids man soften towards others, and forget himself for the sake of others: it constrains genuine nature, which is selfish and gross. — Hippolyte Taine
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
Reason is a faculty far larger than mere objective force. When either the political or the scientific discourse announces itself as the voice of reason, it is playing God, and should be spanked and stood in the corner. — Ursula K. Le Guin
There is no such thing as public opinion. There is only published opinion.
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
If you listen to the political discourse in America today, you would think that all our problems have been caused by the Mexicans of the Chinese or the Muslims. The reality is that we have caused our own problems. Whatever has happened has been caused by isolating ourselves or blaming others. — Fareed Zakaria
TV serves us most usefully when presenting junk-entertainment; it serves us most ill when it co-opts serious modes of discourse - news, politics, science, education, commerce, religion. — Neil Postman
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
This great honor recognizes the history of CRISPR and the collaborative story of harnessing it into a profoundly powerful engineering technology that gives new hope and possibility to our society. What started as a curiosity-driven, fundamental discovery project has now become the breakthrough strategy used by countless researchers working to help improve the human condition. I encourage continued support of fundamental science as well as public discourse about the ethical uses and responsible regulation of CRISPR technology. — Jennifer Doudna
Trigger warnings are an instantiation of the West's zeitgeist of perpetual offense and victimhood that defines much of public discourse. — Gad Saad
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
A tiny portion of the population controls the lions share of the wealth and most of the command positions of state, manufacturing, banking, investment, publishing, higher education, philanthropy, and media... these individuals exercise a preponderant influence over what is passed off as public information and democratic discourse. — Michael Parenti
Jay-Z's a guy that wears the Che Guevara t-shirt and he doesn't realize Che Guevara was a racist. Che Guevara was a murderer and a killer. So look, he's an entertainer, obviously. He's not in the middle of any public discourse here. But I think it's important to point out when people take stances like this that are absurd. — Marco Rubio
No diet will remove all the fat from your body, becayse the brain is entirely fat. Without a brain, you might look good, but all you could do is run for public office.
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
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
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
Sermons remain one of the last forms of public discourse where it is culturally forbidden to talk back. — Harvey Cox
I hold to the idea that civility, understood as the willingness to engage in public discourse, is the first virtue of citizens. — Mark Kingwell
As the growing emphasis on feelings crowds out reason, facts will play a smaller role in public discourse. — Paul Craig Roberts
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
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
Actual human discourse happens within a number of contexts, not in some sort of unified public forum. — Rowan D. Williams
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
Actual human discourse happens within a number of contexts, not in some sort of unified public forum. — Rowan Williams
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
Allow me to introduce myself. I am a traitor and an idiot. Also, my mother should have aborted me and left me in a dumpster, but since she didn't, I should 'off' myself. — Kathleen Parker
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
Secularists are often wrongly accused of trying to purge religious ideals from public discourse. We simply want to deny them public sponsorship. — Wendy Kaminer
I am comfortable with my level of public discourse. — Neil Armstrong
That is another theme in the book [Dreams from My Father]. How do we exercise more empathy in our public discourse? How do we get the black to see through the eyes of the white? Or the citizen to see through the eyes of the immigrant? Or the straight to see through the eyes of the gay? That has always been a struggle in our politics. — Barack Obama
If conservatives come to control the White House and both Houses of Congress, there will be very little change in Hollywood, the network evening news, universities, church bureaucracies, the New York Times, or the Washington Post. Institutions that are overwhelmingly left-liberal will continue to misinform the public and distort public discourse. — Robert Bork
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
We are the raison d'être of the entire system. We are also the employers of those in public office and in the public service. Why should we accept from them a discourse which suggests contempt for us and for the democratic system? — John Ralston Saul
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. — Carl Bernstein
Beyond exhibiting contemporary art, the Hirshhorn will become a public forum, a place of discourse for issues around arts, culture, politics and policy. — Liz Diller
It's really awful, the rhetoric that's becoming part of the national discourse, but when it has such an ugly headline - that's what activated a group of people that was otherwise complacent to go, "Hey, I'm going down to the airport, and I'm going to hold hands in solidarity around Muslims in the arrival section of the airport." That's why I've made a choice to be so public about my position. — Hasan Minhaj
It may be that there is so much ambiguity and ideology attached to the term 'terrorism' that it is best to avoid its use altogether, as it is likely to be twisted in public discourse to demonise the enemies of the established order, while exempting state violence from legal and moral scrutiny. — Richard A. Falk
In a democratic society, as Max Weber said, what is possible is only possible because some people have demanded the impossible. The abolitionists helped to create a public discourse in which men like Lincoln become possible. That doesn't mean Lincoln is an abolitionist. It means there is a public opinion out there which is being influenced by antislavery sentiment. — Eric Foner
The United States has degenerated into a social order that is awash in public stupidity and views critical thought as both a liability and a threat. Not only is this obvious in the presence of a celebrity culture that embraces the banal and idiotic, but also in the prevailing discourses and policies of a range of politicians and anti-public intellectuals who believe that the legacy of the Enlightenment needs to be reversed. — Henry Giroux
I set my life since then attempting to figure out how to do that, basically how to have a sort of public discourse in which anything and everything are open to conversation and in which the thought experiment is a means by which to posit all manner of different realities, potential futures. — Jonathon Keats
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.
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
Public discourse requires making an argument for a point of view, not having an argument - as in having a fight. — Deborah Tannen
Atheists have just as much of a right to the public discourse as any ... people of any religious faith in this country. — Al Gore
The left is entering a new phase of ideological agitation no longer trying to win the debate but stopping debate altogether, banishing from public discourse any and all opposition. The proper word for that attitude is totalitarian. It declares certain controversies over and visits serious consequences from social ostracism to vocational defenestration upon those who refuse to be silenced. — Charles Krauthammer
The good news is you can get a lot of information off the Internet for free and in a hurry. But I think the breaking up of the media, which is otherwise kind of healthy, has contributed to less actual reporting and a louder, more contentious, more divisive public discourse, highlighting conflict, sometimes falsely. — William J. Clinton
I have and I will always work to promote a civil public discourse. — Bob Etheridge
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
But once you publish a book, doesn’t it by definition become the realm of public discourse? Otherwise, wouldn’t we just write books and print them out ourselves, and give them to specific people we felt comfortable giving them to–like gifts? Isn’t publishing sort of a social contract? — Jonathan Evison
If there is an ‘overabundance’ of an idea in the absence of direct governmental action - which there well might be when compared with some ideal state of public debate - then action disfavoring that idea might ‘un-skew,’ rather than skew, public discourse. — Elena Kagan
In Conclusion
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