Yquotes.com

 

I hold to the idea that civility, understood as the willingness to engage in public discourse, is the first virtue of citizens.
--
Preface, p. viii

 

Mark Kingwell

» Mark Kingwell - all quotes »

Similar quotes

 

As soon as we cease to believe in such an engineer and in a discourse which breaks with the received historical discourse, and as soon as we admit that every finite discourse is bound by a certain bricolage and that the engineer and the scientist are also species of bricoleurs, then the very idea of bricolage is menaced and the difference in which it took on its meaning breaks down.

 

Jacques Derrida

 

An orthodox thunders against the egotism of atheists, “who do not want to enter into God’s kingdom like little children but want to be something.” Here the category is correct, but now he is going to make his discourse weightier and appeals to that Bible passage [Matthew 18:2], literally understood, about being a little child (literally understood). Can one blame the atheist for assuming His Reverence to be a bit lunatic, quite literally understood? The difficult discourse with which the orthodox began has become balderdash, because for a little child it is not at all difficult, and for an adult it is impossible. In a certain sense, to be something and to want to be something is the condition (the negative condition) for entering the kingdom of heaven as a little child-if it is supposed to be difficult-otherwise it is no wonder that one remains outside when one has become forty years old. So, then, the atheist perhaps wants to mock Christianity, and yet there is no one who makes it more ludicrous as the orthodox.

 

Soren Aabye Kierkegaard

 

One rule observed in their council is, never to debate a thing on the same day in which it is first proposed; for that is always referred to the next meeting, that so men may not rashly and in the heat of discourse engage themselves too soon, which might bias them so much that, instead of consulting the good of the public, they might rather study to support their first opinions, and by a perverse and preposterous sort of shame hazard their country rather than endanger their own reputation, or venture the being suspected to have wanted foresight in the expedients that they at first proposed; and therefore, to prevent this, they take care that they may rather be deliberate than sudden in their motions.

 

St. Thomas More

 

To counter the fixation on a rhetoric of victimhood, black folks must engage in a discourse of self-determination.

 

bell hooks

 

At times, we’ve disagreed on matters of policy. But one thing we’ve always shared is a notion of what public service should be. That it ought to be more than just doing what’s popular in the moment. That it ought to be about what’s right for our nation, over the long term. It ought to be about problem-solving and governance, not just how we can score political points on each other or engage in obstructionism. And where compromise is not a vice and where bipartisanship is a actually considered a virtue -- to be rewarded, not punished.

 

Barack Obama