C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Discussion
The bitter clamor of two eager tongues.
Religious contention is the devil’s harvest.
Free and fair discussion will ever be found the firmest friend to truth.
Men are never so likely to settle a question rightly as when they discuss it freely.
The fair way of conducting a dispute is to exhibit, one by one, the arguments of your opponent, and, with each argument, the precise and specific answer you are able to make to it.
The skilful disputant well knows that he never has his enemy at more advantage than when, by allowing the premises, he shows him arguing wrong from his own principles.
Of a certain class of disputants it has been wittily observed that their conclusions are always right and their reasons for them invariably wrong.
Whoever is afraid of submitting any question, civil or religious, to the test of free discussion, is more in love with his own opinion than with truth.
The great enemy of knowledge is not error, but inertness. All that we want is discussion; and then we are sure to do well, no matter what our blunders may be. One error conflicts with another, each destroys its opponent, and truth is evolved.