Michel de Montaigne Quotes

I'm a talker. I love a good debate.

The very essence of modern life is the opportunity for people everywhere to speak, hear, persuade, change their minds, know what others are thinking, and think for themselves.

Debate is so much better than denial.

Philosophy is a performance sport - you have to play it with somebody back and forth.

Argument is to me the air I breathe.

Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.

Contention is inseparable from creating knowledge. It is not contention we should try to avoid, but discourses that attempt to suppress contention.

Discussion in America means dissent.

As I say, I'm a discourse advocate. What form it comes is less important to me than the fact that there is discourse.

That's what we're missing. We're missing argument. We're missing debate. We're missing colloquy. We're missing all sorts of things. Instead, we're accepting.

I love argument, I love debate. I don't expect anyone just to sit there and agree with me, that's not their job.

There's always merit to having a debate.

Argument is to me the air I breathe. Given any proposition, I cannot help believing the other side and defending it.

I often begin a thought with spirit and finish it with nonsense. The chain of my argument often escapes me, and when lost can seldom be retrieved. These faults are so overpowering that I should sink into perpetual silence were it not that sometimes in ardor of debate, when my feelings are wound up to a high tone, elocution pours itself along with unusual rapidity, and I have passages which would not shame a good speaker; this is the only thing that makes me tolerable to others or to myself.

Now, you've seen that each one of us have a couple of soapboxes that we like to mount. And after about five minutes of our opinion, then we ask you a question.

I must remind the right honorable gentleman that a monologue is not a decision.

If you want someone to accept new evidence, make sure to present it to them in a context that doesn’t trigger a defensive, emotional reaction.

I'm going to be a guy who can defend a bunch of different positions.

I was on the debate team.

I love a spirited debate.

A debate is a very specific kind of performance.

I want people to have conversations, to have controversy because it creates dialogue and builds bridges.

'In his celebrated book, 'On Liberty', the English philosopher John Stuart Mill argued that silencing an opinion is "a peculiar evil." If the opinion is right, we are robbed of the "opportunity of exchanging error for truth"; and if it's wrong, we are deprived of a deeper understanding of the truth in its "collision with error." If we know only our own side of the argument, we hardly know even that: it becomes stale, soon learned by rote, untested, a pallid and lifeless truth.'

I'll argue anyone into the dust when it comes to facts.

Many can argue - not many converse.