Popular quotes about Argument! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
The strangest thing about the low quality of Internet argument is that effective argument isnt really so difficult. Sure, not everyone can be Clarence Darrow, but anyone who wants to be at least competent at argument can do it.
Barry EislerNeoliberalism is vulnerable. When it comes to talking about social provisions, the only argument they have is the argument of barbarians: that social provisions make people dependent, and dependency is an evil, and people have to pick themselves up by their bootstraps. And that is such bullshit that it boggles my mind.
Henry GirouxIt depends on the situation. I mean, on one hand there's the argument that people should be left alone on the other hand, there's the argument to wade in a stop slaughters in places like Bosnia and Kosovo and what we probably should have done in Rwanda.
Jello BiafraA master salesman is one who takes the offensive and never the defensive sale of an argument, if argument arises.
Napoleon HillBoth law and comedy are heavily focused on thought and viewing all angles. To write a good joke, you have to look at a premise every way possible. And with a good legal argument, you have to see all sides to get the best line of argument for your client. Law school made me a better comic, and comedy has made me a better public speaker.
Troy WalkerIn exorcism, a verbal argument can never do anything. You can't ever beat the entity in a verbal argument because that's what he wants. It's only through a confront, a non-verbal confront, that anything happens. It has to be non-verbal.
William S. BurroughsI shall not convert you at the end of my argument. I think the argument is sound. I hold that belief in God is not merely as reasonable as other belief, or even a little or infinitely more probably true than other belief; I hold rather that unless you believe in God you can logically believe in nothing else.
Cornelius Van TilThe secular argument, or the liberal argument, is to as much as possible remove taboos so things do not become unmentionable; to let some air into the discussion.
Christopher HitchensArgument is to me the air I breathe. Given any proposition, I cannot help believing the other side and defending it.
Gertrude Stein[Margot Hentoff] thinks - first of all, she - this I hear from a lot of people beside her. She thinks that men have no business getting into this argument at all unless they're going to be pro-choice. But it turns out that a fair number of fetuses are male, and besides that, we are all one part of humankind, it seems to me.
Nat HentoffGiven the difficulty of resisting such temptations over the longer run, a proper concern for the welfare of congressional souls may well be the ultimate argument in favor of term limitations.
James L. BuckleyIf P=NP, then the world would be a profoundly different place than we usually assume it to be. There would be no special value in โcreative leaps,โ no fundamental gap between solving a problem and recognizing the solution once it's found. Everyone who could appreciate a symphony would be Mozart; everyone who could follow a step-by-step argument would be Gauss; everyone who could recognize a good investment strategy would be Warren Buffett.
Scott AaronsonHillary Clinton says nobody should be deported that entered illegally unless they commit a violent felony, which is an argument for open borders and American people reject that.
Jeff SessionsBy ethical argument and moral principle the greatest crimes are eventually shown to have been necessary, and, in fact, a signal benefit to mankind.
ZhuangziThere's an argument that maybe [The Grinder] was better suited for streaming or cable. I don't know. I still like to think there's a place for smart, subversive, original comedies on networks.
Rob LoweRegarding social order, [Francis] Fukuyama writes, "The systematic study of how order, and thus social capital, can emerge in spontaneous and decentralized fashion is one of the most important intellectual developments of the late twentieth century." He correctly attributes the modern origins of this argument to F. A. Hayek, whose pioneering contributions to cognitive science, the study of cultural evolution, and the dynamics of social change put him in the forefront of the most creative scholars of the 20th century.
Douglass NorthThere prevails among men of letters, an opinion, that all appearance of science is particularly hateful to Women; and that therefore whoever desires to be well received in female assemblies, must qualify himself by a total rejection of all that is serious, rational, or important; must consider argument or criticism as perpetually interdicted; and devote all his attention to trifles, and all his eloquence to compliment.
Samuel JohnsonThe argument that women who become pregnant have in some sense consented to the pregnancy belies realityand others who are the inevitable losers in the contraceptive lottery no more 'consent' to pregnancy than pedestrians 'consent' to being struck by drunk drivers.'
Dawn JohnsenAnother argument holds that opposing Saddam Hussein would cause even greater troubles in that part of the world, and interfere with the larger war against terror. I believe the opposite is true.
Dick CheneyPhilosophical argument has sometimes shaken my reason for the faith that was in me but my heart has always assured me that the Gospel of Jesus Christ must be reality.
Daniel WebsterAn officer should never speak ironically or sarcastically to an enlisted man, since the latter does not have a fair chance to answer back. The use of profanity and epithets comes under the same headings. The best argument for a man keeping his temper is that nobody else wants it; and when he voluntary throws it away, he loses a main prop to his own position.
Samuel Lyman Atwood MarshallFor I had often said that the best argument I knew for an immortal life was the existence of a man who deserved one as well as Child did.
William JamesHeydrich, Eichmann, and company therefore invoke the usual trick of argument for breaking a true continuum that lacks a compelling point for separation: choose an arbitrary dividing line and then treat it as a self-evident law of nature.
Stephen Jay GouldWhat we have to understand that we have to believe into things which can be proved. Now the time has come that Divine itself has to be proved. That God Almighty has to be proved. That Christ as a son of God has to be proved, that His birth as immaculate conception has to be proved. Not by argument, not by reasoning, nor by blind faith but by actualization on your central nervous system.
Nirmala SrivastavaIf you go in for argument take care of your temper. Your logic if you have any will take care of itself.
Joseph P. FarrellWe need to reflect with great seriousness about why many young people don't feel like getting married... For fear of failure, many do not want to even think about it... Many people believe the change that has taken place in recent decades was set in motion by the emancipation of women. But this argument is not valid, it is an insult, a form of misogyny.
Pope FrancisThe sad fact is that today most of the heads of big businesses in America have become so confused or intimidated that, so far from carrying the free market to argument to the enemy, they fail to defend themselves adequately even when attacked.
Henry HazlittSome of the people who are now manipulating photos, such as Andreas Gursky, make the argument - rightly - that the 'straight' photographs of the 1940s and 50s were no such thing. Ansell Adams would slap a red filter on his lens, then spend three days burning and dodging in the dark room, making his prints. That's a manipulation. Even the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, with all due respect to him, are notoriously burned and dodged.
Joel SternfeldNo one appreciates a professional anymore. Everyone's a mystic. Which is why I take drunk Jim over acid Jim - the argument all roads eventually lead to.
Dan BejarYes, 85 percent of the art you see isn't any good. But everyone has a different opinion about which 85 percent is bad. That in turn creates fantastically unstable interplay and argument.
Jerry SaltzMost people have learned to live in the moment. The argument goes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no need to dwell on the past. And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence. Rather, each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own. ... It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning.
Alan LightmanEven fairly good students, when they have obtained the solution of the problem and written down neatly the argument, shut their books and look for something else. Doing so, they miss an important and instructive phase of the work. ... A good teacher should understand and impress on his students the view that no problem whatever is completely exhausted.
George PolyaA strong argument for the religion of Christ is this - that offences against Charity are about the only ones which men on their death-beds can be made - not to understand - but to feel - as crime.
Edgar Allan PoeIt is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection. We are supposed to abandon this naรฏve response, not in favor of a fully worked out physical/chemical explanation but in favor of an alternative that is really a schema for explanation, supported by some examples. What is lacking, to my knowledge, is a credible argument that the story has a nonnegligible probability of being true.
Thomas NagelIf we carry this line of argument to its logical conclusion, the meaning of life consists of the flaws in one's conceptions and what one does about them. Life can be seen as a fertile fallacy.
George SorosMy wife and I had an argument last week that was so stupid, that it bears repeating. My wife collects twist ties...welcome to my world.
Bill EngvallYou make men love their government and their country by giving them the kind of government and the kind of country that inspire respect and love; a country that is free and unafraid, that lets the discontented talk in order to learn the causes of their discontent and end those causes, that refuses to impel men to spy on their neighbors, that protects its citizens vigorously from harmful acts while it leaves the remedies for objectionable ideas to counter-argument and time.
Zechariah ChafeeLeaders may recognize that they are not addressing the real problems, but they rationalize their actions with the argument that they must first politically survive in order to later address the hard problems and sacrifices. Of course, they usually don't ever actually get around to addressing the fundamental problems later, either because they don't make it through the initial crisis or because, even later, they are not willing to risk sacrificing their own position or "career" with needed measures that usually require tough sacrifices by the population.
Arthur DemarestA kind, courteous Christian is the most powerful argument in favor of the gospel that can be produced.
Ellen G. WhiteOn what does the Christian argument for Immortality really rest? It stands upon the pedestal on which the theologian rests the whole of historical Christianity-the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
William Henry DrummondOriginally the big argument was that they wanted to call it "raw and uncut" and I told them I had a problem with that. When you say "raw" it implies that my show is dirty and that's not the case.
Gabriel IglesiasMy argument is limited to saying that a major new medium changes the structure of discourse; it does so by encouraging certain uses of the intellect, by favoring certain definitions of intelligence and wisdom, and by demanding a certain kind of content - in a phrase, by creating new forms of truth-telling.
Neil Postman