Controversy Quotes
More Controversy Quotes
If you do not specify and confront real issues, what you say will surely obscure them. If you do not embody controversy, what you say will be an acceptance of the drift to the coming human hell.
c. wright mills— Foreword, The Marxists (1962)
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
— Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to Love (1963).
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
Martin Luther King Jr.— American civil rights activist
The long and distressing controversy over capital punishment is very unfair to anyone meditating murder.
— 1957 In the Sunday Times, 24 Feb.
Edward de Bono is the Cambridge academic who is making a lot of money out of peddling his ideas about "lateral thinking" to managers, bureaucrats and anyone else who will pay to listen. Whether the concept of lateral thinking is pure hokum or a precious revelation is a matter of some controversy. Either way, de Bono has won himself a small niche in communications history as the star of Britain's first complete, video- cassette-oriented film series, "Organised creativity and lateral thinking".
edward de bono— Timothy Johnson (1971) "Science and the paymasters: Videocasettes: What happened" In: New Scientist Vol. 52, nr. 774, 16 dec 1971. p. 177
We are fond of distinctions; we place ourselves in opposition, and quarrel under the denominations of faction and party, without any material subject of controversy.
adam ferguson— PART I, SECTION IV
What’s being pushed is to have Darwinism critiqued, to teach there’s a controversy. Intelligent design itself does not have any content.
— Interview with the Boston Globe (July 27, 2005)
When a thing ceases to be a subject of controversy, it ceases to be a subject of interest.
william hazlitt— "On The Spirit of Controversy," The Atlas (30 January 1830), reprinted in The Collected Works of William Hazlitt (1902-1904)
Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Expose your ideas to the danger of controversy. Speak your mind and fear less the label of "crackpot" than the stigma of conformity.
thomas j. watson— Attributed to Watson in: Georg Blair, Sandy Meadows (1996) A Real-Life Guide to Organizational Change. p. 117
From the accession of Henry the Seventh to the breaking out of the civil wars, England enjoyed much greater exemption from war, foreign and domestic, than for a long period before, and during the controversy between the houses of York and Lancaster. These years of peace were favorable to commerce and the arts. Commerce and the arts augmented general and individual knowledge; and knowledge is the only fountain, both of the love and the principles of human liberty.
Daniel Webster— Page 93. (On the Completion of the Bunker Hill Monument (1843))
Science follows the evidence wherever it leads, but Darwinism does not. So the present controversy over evolution is not a war between science and religion. It is primarily a war between Darwinism and evidence--and the evidence will win.
jonathan wells— The Problem Of Evidence, 2009.
The controversy between rule of law and rule of men was never relevant to women because, along with juveniles, imbeciles, and other classes of legal nonpersons, they had no access to law except through men.
freda adler— P. 203. (Sisters in Crime: The Rise of the New Female Criminal (1975))
The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials, and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One's right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.
robert h. jackson— 319 U.S. at 638.
The thing that strikes me more and more and it strikes a lot of other people, too is the extraordinary viciousness and dishonesty of political controversy in our time.:; I don't mean merely that controversies are acrimonious.:; They ought to be that when they are on serious subjects.:; I mean that almost nobody seems to feel that an opponent deserves a fair hearing or that the objective truth matters as long as you can score a neat debating point.
george orwell— "As I Please," Tribune (8 December 1944)[26]
My stress on the truth in sexual stereotypes and on the biologic basis of sex differences is sure to cause controversy.
camille paglia— p. xiii (Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990))
Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion.
george santayana— Ch. VI (Vol. III, Reason in Religion)
The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities, and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. / One's right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.
— Robert H. Jackson (1943). West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette. Supreme Court of the United States. pp. 319 U.S. 624, 638.
I don't do things for the response or the controversy. I just live my life.
rihanna— Interview with "Access Hollywood" on March 15, 2016
Since their initiation, LGATs have been the subject of much controversy. While LGAT supporters argue that such interventions are vehicles for personal growth and societal change and are a cost-effective means of introducing beneficial therapeutic messages to large audiences (Berger, 1977; Erhard & Gioscia, 1978; Shaw, 1977), others view them as a hazardous and irresponsible use of powerful psychological principles and psychotherapeutic procedures (see, e.g., Brewer, 1975; Rome, 1977).
— Fisher, Jeffrey D., Silver, Chinsky, Goff, Klar, Zagieboylo (1989). "Psychological effects of participation in a large group awareness training". Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 57: 747–755. DOI:10.1037/0022-006X.57.6.747. ISSN 0022-006X. Retrieved on 2010-06-25.
He was the great prose satirist of the Elizabethan period and may rightly be considered as the forerunner of that much greater satirist whose Tale of a Tub was a brilliant attack upon all forms of religious controversy.
— Sir Adolphus William Ward and Alfred Rayney Waller (eds.) The Cambridge History of English and American Literature (1907-21), vol. 3, ch. 17, sect. 16. [1]
What’s being pushed is to have Darwinism critiqued, to teach there’s a controversy. Intelligent design itself does not have any content.
— George Gilder Interview with the Boston Globe (July 27, 2005)
At the heart of the controversy in these cases are those recurring pregnancies that pose no danger whatsoever to the life or health of the mother but are, nevertheless, unwanted for any one or more of a variety of reasons -- convenience, family planning, economics, dislike of children, the embarrassment of illegitimacy, etc.
— Byron White, U.S. Supreme Court, one of two dissenters in Roe v. Wade, (January 22, 1973).
The Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ levelled to every understanding, and too plain to need explanation, saw in the mysticism of Plato, materials with which they might build up an artificial system, which might, from its indistinctness, admit everlasting controversy, give employment for their order, and introduce it to profit, power and pre-eminence. The doctrines which flowed from the lips of Jesus himself are within the comprehension of a child:;; but thousands of volumes have not yet explained the Platonisms engrafted on them; and for this obvious reason, that nonsense can never be explained.
— Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams (July 5, 1814). Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 11, pp. 397–398.
In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars , the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.
— Seventh Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Courts do not exist for the sake of discipline, but for the sake of deciding matters in controversy.
— Bowen, L.J., Cropper v. Smith (1884), L. R. 26 C. D. 710.
From this circumstance alone, that a controversy has been long kept on foot, and remains undecided, we may presume that there is some ambiguity in the expression, and that the disputants affix different ideas to the terms employed in the controversy.
— David Hume, in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), VIII: Of Liberty and Necessity, Part I
The Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ levelled to every understanding, and too plain to need explanation, saw in the mysticism of Plato, materials with which they might build up an artificial system, which might, from its indistinctness, admit everlasting controversy, give employment for their order, and introduce it to profit, power and pre-eminence. The doctrines which flowed from the lips of Jesus himself are within the comprehension of a child:;; but thousands of volumes have not yet explained the Platonisms engrafted on them; and for this obvious reason, that nonsense can never be explained.
— Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams (July 5, 1814). Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 11, pp. 397–398.
It was an example of what he thought of as the Law of controversy: Passion was inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.
gregory benford— Chapter 14 (p. 182, known as Benford's law of controversy)
