Academic Debate Quotes

If you're also in the arena and you're putting your ideas out and you're owning them and you're saying "I disagree with you about this and that, I think you've got this wrong" - then not only do I invite that, I freaking love that. I love that. I'm an academic. I'm hardwired for a good debate.

I'm an academic. I'm hardwired for a good debate.

Criticism in the universities, I'll have to admit, has entered a phase where I am totally out of sympathy with 95% of what goes on. It's Stalinism without Stalin.

I think academics are infuriating. For every expert on Shakespeare there is another one to cancel his theory out. It drives you up the wall. I think the greatest form of finding out the truth is through fantasy.

Academic freedom is being lost by a great many people who dare to challenge Darwinism. That's a terrifying situation. That's contrary to the principles of science.

They can shout down the head of the physics department at Cal Tech.

The creators of Wonder Woman had no interest in proving an actual link to the past. In some parts of the academic world, however, the historical existence of the Amazons, or any matriarchal society, has long been a raging issue.

To be an outspoken professor in academia is a very dangerous proposition.

The new strategy is to teach intelligent design without calling it intelligent design.

Most of the debates I've participated in have been on Christian college campuses or on secular campuses; so, largely before a student audience.

Consciousness, there are about 20,000 papers on consciousness with no consensus. Nowhere in history have so many people devoted so much time to produce so little.

Scholars will argue with each other about everything.

I was always interested in law at school; it was a great outlet to argue but not make anyone angry!

I was probably that obnoxious kid in first-year university who would try to win a political debate by just, you know, being belligerent.

Well, first of all, no professor should be able to say, I refuse to defend my position. I refuse to debate my position.

Let the historians and the Ph.D. students work out their doctrines. I'm not interested in theories per se.

Make no mistake about it: Law school is not a bastion of intellectual discourse.

It seems to me that socialists today can preserve their position in academic economics merely by the pretense that the differences are entirely moral questions about which science cannot decide.

I remember thinking when I was in college that a lot of these known Chomsky-like, verbose, high-lefty thinkers made absolutely no sense, but I thought that was my problem.

No doubt science cannot admit of compromises, and can only bring out the complete truth. Hence there must be controversy, and the strife may be, and sometimes must be, sharp. But must it even then be personal? Does it help science to attack the man as well as the statement? On the contrary, has not science the noble privilege of carrying on its controversies without personal quarrels?

A distinction between renewable and not renewable energy is academic.

For these two years I have been gravitating towards your doctrines, and since the publication of your primula paper with accelerated velocity. By about this time next year I expect to have shot past you, and to find you pitching into me for being more Darwinian than yourself. However, you have set me going, and must just take the consequences, for I warn you I will stop at no point so long as clear reasoning will take me further.

Seneca brings vividly before us a picture of the various scholars assembled in a school of the philosophers.

How long it takes for reforms of ritual ceremonies to be discussed among scholars who all have their own ideas.

Even within traditional universities there has always been debate about whether it wouldn't be better to focus on only one course at a time.