“Whenever people are being intellectually dishonest in debate, it is an implicit concession they have lost the fight”

This bill is the legislative equivalent of crack. It yields a short-term high but does long-term damage to the system and it’s expensive to boot.

The best humor is offered up to you by the stupidity of your opponents.

I believe it is a good thing to get rid of Gaddafi. But does America have to do everything?

I don’t think Donald Trump is the right person because I very much disagree with him.

I do not believe that the federal government should treat adults who choose to smoke marijuana as criminals.

I think there were two criticisms you can make of Donald Trump’s involvement in the Health Care Bill. First of all, there were times when he wasn’t being helpful. Secondly, there were times when he was trying to be helpful. I’m not sure which one did more damage.

But it is also clear that left entirely untouched by public policy, the capitalist system will produce more inequality than is socially healthy or than is necessary for maximum efficiency.

In a free society, a large degree of human activity is none of the government’s business. We should make criminal what’s going to hurt other people and other than that we should leave it to people to make their own choices.

It is because the fight against the harshest aspects of unrestricted capitalism is therefore a political problem and not an intellectual one that community action remains so essential.

And unless you think there is a serious chance you’re going to jail, don’t listen to your lawyer.

When I was here there was still a requirement that students had to swim 50 yards to graduate…because Harry Elkins Widener had drowned with the sinking of the Titanic. And it made me very grateful at the time that he had not gone down in a plane crash.

Martin Luther King said, and it is sadly still true, that one of the most segregated times in America is the hour of worship.

Ronald Reagan believes in the free market like some people believe in unicorns.

For many of those who had historically supported welfare programs in the broadest sense, it was perfectly reasonable to enact legislation in which poor people were the objects of efforts to assist them.

It is, of course, further indication that a fundamentalist right has really taken over much of the Republican Party, People might cite George Bush as proof that you can be totally impervious to the effects of Harvard and Yale education.

Excessive partisanship is the problem. There has never been a democracy in the history of the world in a polity of any size where you didn’t have political parties. Even sometimes over the objections of the people who started it.

Unfortunately, public debates do not have much room for subtlety. The audience wants a quick thrust at your opponent, not a slow and convoluted series of moves.

The debate takes on tinges of racism, emotion.

In all intellectual debates, both sides tend to be correct in what they affirm, and wrong in what they deny.

The one hour live debate in the West Wing that we did was one of the most exciting times for me on stage or on camera, because anything could go wrong.

It’s hard to have that debate around secret programs authorized by secret legal opinions issued by a secret court. Actually, it’s impossible to have that debate.

In my family, there were Kei and Minoru and then there were the rest. Everyone in my family is very opinionated and everyone tried to join the debate. But by the time my turn came, there was nothing left to say.

I am incrementally a pessimist, but I see the international debate that Edward Snowden has engendered, and I think this is exactly where the discussion should be. So, I would say I’m more optimistic than pessimistic.

A fool is he that comes to preach or prate, When men with swords their right and wrong debate.