George Carlin - William J Brennan - Don Barker – Cicero - Christopher Hitchens - Thomas Huxley - Margaret Thatcher - John Polkinghorne - D M Graham - Nelson Mandela - Neil deGrasse Tyson - Noam Chomsky - William Penn - George Orwell - Aristotle - Voltaire - Monty Python’s Flying Circus TV - Best of Enemies 2015 - Race for the White House 2016 - William Buckley: Firing Line 1978-1999 - Panorama TV - Glenn Greenwald - Second Thought online -
The limits of debate in this country are established even before the debate begins, then everyone else is marginalised. George Carlin
Profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials. William J Brennan, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States re New York Times Co v Sullivan 1964
I’ve debated some liberal Christians and it’s like trying to nail jello to the tree. Dan Barker, lecture 2001, ‘Losing Faith in Faith’
Brevity is the best recommendation of speech, whether in a senator or an orator. Marcus Tullius Cicero
About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to woo and to win the approval of supernatural beings. Very often, when I give my view that there is no supernatural dimension, and certainly not one that is only or especially available to the faithful, and that the natural world is wonderful enough – and even miraculous enough if you insist – I attract pitying looks and anxious questions. How, in that case, I am asked, do I find meaning and purpose in life? How does a mere and gross materialist, with no expectation of a life to come, decide what, if anything, is worth caring about?
Depending on my mood, I sometimes but not always refrain from pointing out what a breathtakingly insulting and patronizing question this is. (It is on a par with the equally subtle inquiry: Since you don’t believe in our god, what stops you from stealing and lying and raping and killing to your heart’s content?) Just as the answer to the latter question is: self-respect and the desire for the respect of others – while in the meantime it is precisely those who think they have divine permission who are truly capable of any atrocity – so the answer to the first question falls into two parts. A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called ‘meaningless’ except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one’s everyday life as if this were so. Whereas if one sought to define meaninglessness and futility, the idea that a human life should be expended in the guilty, fearful, self-obsessed propitiation of supernatural nonentities … but there, there. Enough. Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
I asserted – and I repeat – that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would rather be a man – a man of restless and versatile intellect – who, not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice. Thomas H Huxley, replying to Soapy Wilberforce
I love argument. I love debate. I don’t expect anyone just to sit there and agree with me. That’s not their job. Margaret Thatcher
Debating with Dawkins is hopeless because there is no give and take. He doesn’t give you an inch; he just says no when you say yes. John Polkinghorne, re Richard Dawkins
That this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country. D M Graham, Oxford Union librarian proposing 1933 motion won by 275-153
A good leader can engage in a debate frankly and thoroughly, knowing that at the end he and the other side must be closer, and thus emerge stronger. You don’t have that idea when you are arrogant, superficial, and uninformed. Nelson Mandela
You’ve never seen me debate anybody. On anything. Ever. My investment of time, as an educator, in my judgment, is best served teaching people how to think about the world around them. Teach them how to pose a question. How to judge whether one thing is true versus another. What the laws of physics say. Neil deGrasse Tyson
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum. Noam Chomsky, The Common Good
In all debates, let truth be thy aim, not victory, or an unjust interest. William Penn
The thing that strikes me more and more, is the extraordinary viciousness and dishonesty of political controversy in our time. I don’t mean merely that controversies are acrimonious. They ought to be that when they are on serious subjects. I mean that almost nobody seems to feel that an opponent deserves a fair hearing or that the objective truth matters as long as you can score a neat debating point. George Orwell, As I Please: 1943-1945
Persuasion is achieved by the speaker’s personal character when the speech is so spoken as to make us think him credible. We believe good men more fully and more readily than others: this is true generally whatever the question is, and absolutely true where exact certainty is impossible and opinions are divided. Aristotle
Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. This is not a function of any other art. Aristotle
The flowery style is not unsuitable to public speeches or addresses, which amount only to compliment. The lighter beauties are in their place when there is nothing more solid to say; but the flowery style ought to be banished from a pleading, a sermon, or a didactic work. Voltaire
Putting the case against the government is a small patch of brown liquid. Monty Python’s Flying Circus s2e1: Face the Press, BBC 1970
During the Republican and Democratic conventions of 1968 ABC News hired the conservative William F Buckley and the liberal Gore Vidal for ten nightly debates on national television. Best of Enemies ***** 2015
ABC was the third of the three networks … ABC needed something provocative, a media event. ibid. observer
Bill Buckley was the first modern conservative intellectual to see that ideological debates were cultural debates, and what he did was to put conservatism on the march: and that’s the creation of the movement we have today. ibid. Sam Tanenhaus, Buckley’s biographer
National Review is the most influential magazine of our time. Why? The magazine attached to a movement. ibid.
For Buckley, Vidal was the devil. He represented everything that was going to moral hell, that was degenerative about the country. ibid. Fred Kaplan, Vidal’s biographer
Gore Vidal is a whore of debate when it comes to values of our country and of historical forces. The man is brilliant. And the man is fun to watch. But there is always a residue in my opinion when I watch him of nausea. ibid. Reid Buckley
I knew Buckley would have done no research. ibid. Vidal
They really do despise one another. Each thought the other was quite dangerous. ibid. Hitchens
Debate 2: Tonight the key question for every patriot is can an ageing Hollywood juvenile actor with a right-wing script defeat Richard Nixon, a professional politician, who currently represents no discernible interest except his own. ibid. Vidal
Buckley was his generation’s greatest debater. He knew very well how to make an argument, but he was even better at dismantling your argument. ibid. Sam Tanenhaus
He’s always to the right I think and almost always in the wrong. And you certainly must, Bill, maintain your reputation as being the Marie Antoinette of the right wing, and continually imposing your own rather bloodthirsty neuroses on the political campaign. ibid. Vidal
A philosophy and an economy of stagnation but also a spiritual world of stagnation. ibid. Buckley of Vidal
It’s very hard to stand up carrying the weight of what I know. ibid. Buckley’s response to panel question about thinking on your feet
Freedom breeds inequality … Unless you have freedom to be unequal, there is no such thing as freedom. ibid. Buckley to Vidal
In the interval between Miami and Chicago I read Myra Breckinridge [Gore Vidal]. It attempts heuristic allegory but fails, giving gratification only to sadist homosexuals and challenge only to taxonomists of perversion. I thought and thought about it. There is nothing left to say about Myra. ibid. Bill Buckley
Gore Vidal was correct in prophesying that we would become an empire. That is our present dilemma. ibid. Reid Buckley
These ad hominem attacks were not at all characteristic of Bill. ibid. Linda Bridges, Buckley’s personal assistant
Buckley couldn’t let it go. ibid. Tanenhaus
On Experiencing Gore Vidal: Can there be any justification in calling a man a queer before ten million people on television? ibid. Bill Buckley, essay Esquire magazine