Notes from: Letter to a Young Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens
If you care about points of agreement and civility, then, you had better be well-equipped with points of argument and conbativity, because if you are not then the "center" will be occupied and defined without your having helped to decide it, or determine what and where it is.

I pass to an observation of the late Sir Karl Popper, who could himself be a tyrant in argument but who nonetheless recognised that argument was valuable, indeed essential, for its own sake. It is very seldom, as he noticed, that in debate any one of two evenly matched antagonists will succeed in actually convincing or "converting" the other. But it is equally seldom that in a properly conducted argument either antagonist will end up holding exactly the same position as that with which he began. Concessions, refinements and adjustments will occur, and each initial polsition will have undergone modification even if it remains ostensibly the "same." Not even the most apparently glacial "system" is immune to this rule. "The more it's the same," as Issac Deutscher presciently said of the old and calcified Soviet Union, "the more it changes."

Noam Chomsky, a most distinguished intellectual and moral dissident, once wrote that the old motto about "speaking truth to power" is overrated. Power, as he points out, quite probably knows the truth already, and is mainly interested in suppressing or limiting or distorting it. We would therefore do better to try and instruct the powerless. I am not sure that there is a real difference in this distinction. Ruthless and arrogant though power can appear, it is only ever held by mere mammals who excrete and yearn, and who suffer from insomnia and insecurity. These mammals are also necessarily vain in the extreme, and often wish to be liked almost as much as they desire to be feared.

Those who try to condemn or embarrass you by the company you keep will usually be found to be in very poor company themselves; in any case they are, as I was once taught to say, tackling the man and not the ball.