quotations about arguments & arguing
The kind of truth that can be asserted by argument had lost all glamour, all lustre, for him, seeming no more now than another aspect of that ancient urge -- much older than the desire for truth -- to command attention.
BARRY UNSWORTH
Sacred Hunger
All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments: no, it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much as the point of departure, as the element in which arguments have their life.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
On Certainty
Brief and bitter the debate.
ROBERT BROWNING
Hervé Riel
One single positive weighs more,
You know, than negatives a score.
MATTHEW PRIOR
Epistle to Fleetwood Shepherd
You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into.
BEN GOLDACRE
Bad Science
In all disputes, so much as there is of passion, so much there is of nothing to the purpose.
THOMAS BROWNE
Religio Medici
A noisy man is always in the right.
WILLIAM COWPER
Conversations
For they are yet but ear-kissing arguments.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
King Lear
When a thing ceases to be a subject of controversy, it ceases to be a subject of interest.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Works
You may say, I am hot; I say I am not,
Only warm, as the subject on which I am got.
JONATHAN SWIFT
The Famous Speechmaker
The most important tactic in an argument next to being right is to leave an escape hatch for your opponent so that he can gracefully swing over to your side without an embarrassing loss of face.
STEPHEN JAY GOULD
attributed, goodreads
Bombs to settle arguments, the order of the boot
Can you hear them crying in the rubble of Beirut?
THE SPECIALS
"War Crimes"
Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be--or to be indistinguishable from--self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.
NEAL STEPHENSON
Cryptonomicon
Testimony is like the shot of a long-bow, which owes its efficacy to the force of the shooter; argument is like the shot of the cross-bow, equally forcible whether discharged by a giant or a dwarf.
ROBERT BOYLE
attributed, A Treatise on Facts as Subjects of Inquiry by a Jury
Why do people always assume that volume will succeed when logic won't?
L.J. SMITH
Nightfall
Treating your adversary with respect is giving him an advantage to which he is not entitled.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
Life of Samuel Johnson
I am bound to furnish my antagonists with arguments, but not with comprehension.
BENJAMIN DISRAELI
speech to the House of Commons
Who over-refines his argument brings himself to grief.
PETRARCH
To Laura in Life
Though we cannot out-vote them, we will out-argue them.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
Life of Samuel Johnson
Last night we had an argument
Oh, oh, yes we did
Although baby, the things I said
I never meant
SMOKEY ROBINSON
"We've Come Too Far to End It Now"