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Calm, open debate, and logical thought drive strength to its maximum effectiveness.

It is the nature, and the advantage, of strong people that they can bring out the crucial questions and form a clear opinion about them. The weak always have to decide between alternatives that are not their own.

We have to be that wedge that drives the question and asks the hard questions.

Who questions much, shall learn much, and retain much.

These critics organize and practice in my case a sort of obsessive personality cult which philosophers should know how to question and above all, to moderate.

Efforts to develop critical thinking falter in practice because too many professors still lecture to passive audiences instead of challenging students to apply what they have learned to new questions.

One can always debate questions back and forth.

Advocacy groups and voters are not wrong to push candidates to declare their position clearly on policy issues. That is good citizenship. Hard questions should be asked of every candidate, every politician. And those public servants should be prepared to answer, but in their own words.

Entertaining these opinions of the course to be pursued, I beg of gentlemen to look at the question, as I have done, in a calm review of facts and of principles.

I don't think anyone would describe me as an understated advocate. Several people have told me my argument style is very direct and very blunt, which I find mystifying. How could you ever be anything but direct and blunt?