Debate Quotes

Our time of national political debate is almost ended. The clamor of these days will soon subside. And your day of thoughtful decision swiftly nears.

Ours would be a sickly democracy - sluggish with age and complacence - if we did not debate great issues with honest zeal. Any enemy that professes to find comfort in this fact confesses his ignorance of democracy's true strength.

Those who, in debate, appeal to their qualifications, argue from memory, not from understanding.

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.

A real leader uses every issue, no matter how serious and sensitive, to ensure that at the end of the debate we should emerge stronger and more united than ever before.

Every revolutionary movement has its peaks of united activity and its valleys of debate and internal confusion. This debate might well have been little more than a healthy internal difference of opinion, but the press loves the sensational and it could not allow the issue to remain within the private domain of the movement. In every drama there has to be an antagonist and a protagonist, and if the antagonist is not there the press will find and build one.

When the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the loser.