For good ideas and true innovation, you need human interaction, conflict, argument, debate.
Unhappy, let alone angry, religious people provide more persuasive arguments for atheism and secularism than do all the arguments of atheists.
The truth is that killing innocent people is always wrong - and no argument or excuse, no matter how deeply believed, can ever make it right. No religion on earth condones the killing of innocent people; no faith tradition tolerates the random killing of our brothers and sisters on this earth.
Tolerance, openness to argument, openness to self-doubt, willingness to see other people's points of view - these are very liberal and enlightened values that people are right to hold, but we can't allow them to delude us to the point where we can't recognise people who are needlessly perpetrating human misery.
Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute.
Our criminal justice system is fallible. We know it, even though we don't like to admit it. It is fallible despite the best efforts of most within it to do justice. And this fallibility is, at the end of the day, the most compelling, persuasive, and winning argument against a death penalty.
I love argument, I love debate. I don't expect anyone just to sit there and agree with me, that's not their job.
The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
There are all kinds of stupid people that annoy me but what annoys me most is a lazy argument.
Discussion is an exchange of knowledge; an argument an exchange of ignorance.