Discussion Quotes

1. "I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America."
Author: Alexis De Tocqueville

2. "To conclude this discussion, assessment of justice demands engagement with the 'eyes of mankind',first, because we may variously identify with the others elsewhere and not just with our local community;second, because our choices and actions may affect the lives of others far as well as near;and third,because what they see from their respective perspective of history and geography may help us to overcome our own parochialism."
Author: Amartya Sen

3. "The strength in our third-quarter financial results is cause for excitement. I'm particularly pleased that we continue to demonstrate impressive growth at the same time we are engaged in important merger discussions."
Author: Bernard Ebbers

4. "So, when the discussion about not using the term feminist came up at a conference workshop, I couldn't believe it. The more I listened, the more I felt the need to express my passion about my identity as a feminist."
Author: Betty Buckley

5. "A good day for Barack Obama is anytime the dominant topic of discussion is anything but the economy."
Author: Bob Beauprez

6. "From a nonpatriarchal metaethical standpoint, however, Singer's and Regan's theoretical similarities are as significant as their differences. In particular, both Singer's utilitarian theory and Regan's rights approach are developed within a framework of patriarchal norms, which includes the subordinatin of emotion to reason, the privileging of abstract principles of conduct, the perception of ethical discussion as a battle between adversaries, and the presumption that ethics shoudl function as a means of social control."
Author: Brian Luke

7. "If I felt we had alienated the Unionists, it would worry me because we've spent a great deal of time trying to open up discussion and dialogue with the Unionist Parties."
Author: Dick Spring

8. "While we need to stay informed about what they read and remain connected to our students, we don't need to participate in every discussion or endorse every book. If students depend on our validation for every book they read, they aren't reading for their own purposes and needs. They are playing the teacher-pleaser game."
Author: Donalyn Miller

9. "There was this discussion to know how long the human ear was really receptive to the music. A 74 minute CD is too long. We thought about making two CDs, 35 minutes each... But the songs need to breathe."
Author: Ed O'Brien

10. "Our first point of discussion is the hunt. (...) My idea is to start the film with an image of the vixen locked out of her lair which has been plugged up. Her terror as she's pursued across the country. This is a big deal. It means training a fox from birth or dressing up a dog to look like a fox. Or hiring David Attenbrorough, who probably knows a few foxes well enough to ask a favour."
Author: Emma Thompson

11. "The little pedlar, it seemed, fancied that he had the tools to fix the wheel. The footmen were glad to hear this, and agreed with him that he should be paid handsomely for such a service. There was some disagreement as to what constituted ‘handsome', however. The discussion of the attractiveness of various sums looked set to continue for some time."
Author: Frances Hardinge

12. "Why had he happened to hear such a discussion and such ideas at the very moment when his own brain was just conceiving … the very same ideas? And why, just at the moment when he had brought away the embryo of his idea from the old woman had he dropped at once upon a conversation about her? This coincidence always seemed strange to him. This trivial talk in a tavern had an immense influence on him in his later action; as though there had really been in it something preordained, some guiding hint…"
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

13. "There are answers which, in turning away wrath, only send it to the other end of the room, and to have a discussion coolly waived when you feel that justice is all on your own side is even more exasperating in marriage than in philosophy."
Author: George Eliot

14. "And once when we were walking on Bredon Hill, we met a bedraggled and exhausted fox. 'Oh, poor thing,' Jack said. 'What shall we do when the hunt comes up? I can already hear them. Oh, I know -- I have an idea.' He cupped his hands and shouted to the first riders, "Hallo, yoicks, gone that way," and pointed in the direction opposite to the one the fox had taken. The whole hunt followed his directions. There followed a long discussion about when lying was morally justifiable, but he boasted delightedly later to my wife that he had saved the life of a poor fox and showed no trace of guilt."
Author: George Sayer

15. "My interests were aroused, and my faith in the cliches of the subject destroyed, as so often with other subjects, by the discussions with my friend, Aaron Director."
Author: George Stigler

16. "There is one class of men, whom it especially behoves to be tenacious of the right of free discussion. I mean the poor."
Author: Gerrit Smith

17. "...every monologue sooner or later becomes a discussion."
Author: Graham Greene

18. "Duke came to us. They volunteered to come to us and made a number of suggestions to some people on my staff. I don't know how I would characterize them, but there have been some discussions going back and forth between Duke and members of my staff."
Author: Gray Davis

19. "...Ame when this is all over we need to have a serious discussion about Mike. I think he has way too much frosting on his flakes.- Donnatella"
Author: Gwen Hayes

20. "I liked discussion and debate and thought that these skills fit well with law. I also had an interest in justice - and later learned that sometimes law and justice actually agree!"
Author: Harold H. Greene

21. "We ourselves have so long ceased to use it [the Christian worldview] except for the discussion of the moral, the liturgical, or the spiritual, that it is rusty and out of date. We have no Christian vocabulary to match the complexities of contemporary political, social, and industrial life. We have long ceased to bring Christian judgement to bear upon the secular public world."
Author: Harry Blamires

22. "You can tell the lowest class by their habit of always talking about persons; the next, by the fact that their habit is always to converse about things; the highest, by their preference for the discussion of ideas."
Author: Henry Thomas Buckle

23. "Nothing so sharpens the thought process as writing down one's arguments. Weaknesses overlooked in oral discussion become painfully obvious on the written page."
Author: Hyman G. Rickover

24. "In modern democracies, press freedom was being used as a cloak to shield media conglomerates' domination of public discussion ‘in which misinformation may be peddled uncorrected and in which reputations may be selectively shredded or magnified. A free press is not an unconditional good.' When the media mislead, she added, ‘the wells of public discourse and public life are poisoned'. Dr Onora O'Neill"
Author: Ian Hargreaves

25. "Yes, alive," said Fudge. "That is — I don't know — is a man alive if he can't be killed? I don't really understand it, and Dumbledore won't explain properly — but anyway, he's certainly got a body and is walking and talking and killing, so I suppose, for the purposes of our discussion, yes, he's alive."
Author: J.K. Rowling

26. "I am explicitly not opening the giant can of worms that is the ongoing current discussion of patent, copyright, and trademark reform."
Author: James Fallows

27. "Not by discussions nor by argument, but by lifting up Christ shall we draw men unto Him."
Author: James Hudson Taylor

28. "Second, there were the discussions and drafts leading up to the White Paper on Employment Policy of 1944 in which the UK government accepted the maintenance of employment as an obligation of governmental policy."
Author: James Meade

29. "I devised a sort of strategy for any sort of discussion that was over my head: I became the moderator. If you're the group's John McLaughlin, you can fake being informed while still being involved by deploying a few pointed but vague questions. If a person is holding forth and another is twitching to interrupt, jump in and ask her why she disagrees. Ask follow-up questions. Nod vigorously while saying things like 'in what sense?' or 'How, specifically?' That way, you smoothly take control of the conversation without actually contributing anything even remotely worthwhile or informative."
Author: Jancee Dunn

30. "Beautiful building," Phoebe said. Sam nodded. "Classical Revival," he said. It was yet another display of his seemingly unending knowledge that both made her proud and made her feel very small. Maybe if she had gone to college she would have learned about building styles and understand what Classical Revival meant. They could have intelligent discussions about things like rooflines and columns."
Author: Jennifer McMahon

31. "Discussion of how California has 'changed,' then, tends locally to define the more ideal California as that which existed at whatever past point the speaker first saw it: Gilroy as it was in the 1960s and Gilroy as it was fifteen years ago and Gilroy as it was when my father and I ate short ribs at the Milias Hotel are three pictures with virtually no overlap, a hologram that dematerializes as I drive through it."
Author: Joan Didion

32. "Priusquam autem ad creationem, hoc est ad finem omnis disputationis, veniamus: tentanda omnia existimo.However, before we come to [special] creation, which puts an end to all discussion: I think we should try everything else."
Author: Johannes Kepler

33. "The nature of the labyrinth, I scribbled into my spiral notebook, and the way out of it. This teacher rocked. I hated discussion classes. I hated talking, and I hated listening to everyone else stumble on their words and try to phrase things in the vaguest possible way so they wouldn't sound dumb, and I hated how it was all just a game of trying to figure out what the teacher wanted to hear and then saying it. I'm in class, so teach me."
Author: John Green

34. "We need a better way to talk about eating animals. We need a way that brings meat to the center of public discussion in the same way it is often at the center of our plates. This doesn't require that we pretend we are going to have a collective agreement. However strong our intuitions are about what's right for us personally and even about what's right for others, we all know in advance that our positions will clash with those of our neighbors. What do we do with that most inevitable reality? Drop the conversation, or find a way to reframe it?"
Author: Jonathan Safran Foer

35. "However ignorant a person may be, he or she can always moralize. And it is the propensity to moralize that takes up most of the space for public discussion in contemporary democracy."
Author: Kenneth Minogue

36. "Should we fear hackers? Intention is at the heart of this discussion."
Author: Kevin Mitnick

37. "Then he muttered like he was talking to himself, "I don't know if I want her to figure out she's fuckin' gorgeous so she isn't so fuckin' clueless when a player marks her or if I'm glad I finally got one who looks as good as her and has no fuckin' clue.""Are you wanting me to participate in this discussion or are you having a conversation with yourself?""You're participation isn't required," Sam replied... and I looked up to see him grinning."
Author: Kristen Ashley

38. "If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence."[Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357 (1927)]"
Author: Louis D. Brandeis

39. "I'm always happy to have the President visit North Carolina. Unfortunately, the citizens of North Carolina who could be most adversely affected by the President's plan have not been invited to the discussion."
Author: Mel Watt

40. "Anyone who in discussion relies upon authority uses, not his understanding, but rather his memory."
Author: Miguel De Unamuno

41. "History — the product, not the raw material — is a bottle with a label. For many years now, the emphasis of historical discussion has been laid upon the label (its iconography, its target-group of customers) and upon the interesting problems of manufacturing bottle-glass. The contents, on the other hand, are tasted in a knowing, perfunctory way and then spat out again. Only amateurs swallow them."
Author: Neal Ascherson

42. "Oh, please, if its ass is feathered and waterproof, its a duck. Hello, pictures with little word balloons makes it a comic book. They're dorky comic books for nerdy antisocial, nonbathing people. End of discussion."
Author: P.C. Cast

43. "The one image that's been causing a lot of discussion is one image that I shot of a man falling head-first from the building, before the buildings fell down. He was trapped in the fire, and decided to jump and take his own life, rather than being burned."
Author: Richard Drew

44. "[Doubt] is not a new idea; this is the idea of the age of reason. This is the philosophy that guided the men who made the democracy that we live under. The idea that no one really knew how to run a government led to the idea that we should arrange a system by which new ideas could be developed, tried out, and tossed out if necessary, with more new ideas bought in - a trial-and-error system. This method was a result of the fact that science was already showing itself to be a successful venture at the end of the eighteenth century. Even then it was clear to socially minded people that the openness of possibilities was an opportunity, and that doubt and discussion were essential to progress into the unknown. If we want to solve a problem that we have never solved before, we must leave the door to the unknown ajar...doubt is not to be feared, but welcomed and discussed."
Author: Richard P. Feynman

45. "Today you are thirteen weeks old and already controversial. You should know that the mention of the name Pablo is alarming to a very few, highly insignificant people. From this palsied paction there is occasionally the slightest pause, and then, 'Oh, really. Pablo.' Then with a small, self-depreciating chuckle, they might tilt their heads playfully and say something like 'Aren't you afraid people will think he's Mexican?'... I find it amusing when they balk at Pablo, as though we were naming you Jesus H. Christ and jamming our nails into your hands. They seem to feel your name is up for general discussion, like naming a local bridge or a stray cat.Hmmm. Mr. Whiskers? I don't like Mr. Whiskers. I like the name Blackie.'Aren't you afraid people will think he's black?"
Author: Suzanne Finnamore

46. "I was the type who looked at discussions of What Is Truth only with a view toward correcting the manuscript. If you were to quote "I am that I am," for example, I thought that the fundamental problem was where to put the comma, inside the quotation marks or outside."
Author: Umberto Eco

47. "Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know."
Author: Vladimir Nabokov

48. "I am willing to take life as a game of chess in which the first rules are not open to discussion. No one asks why the knight is allowed his eccentric hop, why the castle may only go straight and the bishop obliquely. These things are to be accepted, and with these rule the game must be played: it is foolish to complain of them."
Author: W. Somerset Maugham

49. "...if you didn't voice your opinion, [Steve Jobs] would mow you down," said Cook. "He takes contrary positions to create more discussion, because it may lead to a better result. So if you don't feel comfortable disagreeing, then you'll never survive."
Author: Walter Isaacson

50. "Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate between what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise meaning than they would otherwise have."
Author: Walter Pater

Discussion Quotes Pictures