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.
The controversy over freedom of speech and of the press is at the bottom a controversy over the desirability, or otherwise, of telling lies.What is really at issue is the right to report events truthfully, or as truthfully as is consistent with the ignorance, bias and self-deception from which every observer necessarily suffers.
— 1946 'The Prevention of Literature', in Polemic, Jan.
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)
The line, often adopted by strong men in controversy, of justifying the means by the end.
jerome— Letter 48 (Sourced)
"Bob’s research will vindicate itself. He finds himself at the center of a firestorm that is really not of his own making, and one day — yes, this day is coming, eventually — after the controversy wanes, Bob’s work will still be standing, simply because it is powerful and true." Ian A. Gravagne.
marks, robert j., ii— Tim Woods, "Baylor faculty member named one of '20 Most Brilliant Christian Professors," Waco Tribune, April 15, 2010
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.
martin marprelate— 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]
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 controversy as to whether socialism is possible has been settled by the fact that it exists, and it is a fundamental axiom of my philosophy, at any rate, that anything that exists, is possible.
kenneth boulding— Boulding (1957) Segments of the economy, 1956, a symposium: the Fifth Economics-in-Action Program sponsored jointly by Republic Steel Corporation and Case Institute of Technology
I appeal to you, therefore, that a man like this stands not only before the bar of this court, but stands before the bar of the high court of History… Long after this controversy is hushed in silence, long after this turmoil and this agitation ceases, long after he is dead and gone, he will be looked upon as the poet of patriotism, as the prophet of nationalism and the lover of humanity. Long after he is dead and gone his words will be echoed and re-echoed not only in India but across distant seas and lands.
chittaranjan das— Speech in defence of Aurobindo Ghosh in the Maincktala Bomb Case. The judgement was issued in 1909. Quoted by Dr. Nitish Sengupta in his “History of the Bengali-speaking People.”
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 recent medical controversy over whether vaccinations cause autism reveals a habit of human cognition thinking anecdotally comes naturally, whereas thinking scientifically does not. "
michael shermer— Shermer, Michael (July, 2008). How Anecdotal Evidence Can Undermine Scientific Results. Scientific American. Retrieved on 2008-07-24.
I don't know what all the controversy is about, quite frankly. I've met Eminem, I met him backstage, and he's really gay.
jon stewart— Grammy Awards, February 21, 2001
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)
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.
No great advance has ever been made in science, politics, or religion, without controversy.
— Lyman Beecher, p. 162. (Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895))
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.
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.
— PART I, SECTION IV
If the orthodoxy of Augustine had remained the teaching of the Church, the final establishment of Evolution would have come far earlier than it did, certainly during the eighteenth instead of the nineteenth century, and the bitter controversy over this truth of Nature would never have arisen.
henry fairfield osborn— Henry Fairfield Osborn, From the Greeks to Darwin (1894)
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)
controversy... What controversy?
Michael Moore— Humorous lines of various advertisements for the film, some showing doctored pictures of Moore walking hand in hand with George W. Bush.
controversy equalizes fools and wise men and the fools know it .
— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1858), Chapter V.
