Popular quotes about Argument! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 2
The argument that someone is a bad man is an inadequate argument for war and certainly an inadequate and unacceptable argument for regime change.
John MajorA rationalist, as I use the word, is a man who attempts to reach decisions by argument and perhaps, in certain cases, by compromise, rather than by violence. He is a man who would rather be unsuccessful in convincing another man by argument than successful in crushing him by force, by intimidation and threats, or even by persuasive propaganda.
Karl PopperSimplicity is all. Simple logic, simple arguments, simple visual images. If you can't reduce your argument to a few crisp words and phrases, there's something wrong with your argument. There's nothing long-winded about 'Libertรฉ, รฉgalitรฉ, fraternitรฉ'.
Maurice SaatchiAccording to a new study, 63% of men surveyed said they like to settle an argument by having sex. The other 37% of the men said they would never want to get into an argument with those men.
Jay LenoIn 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. BurroughsThere are two kinds of comprehensive doctrines, religious and secular. Those of religious faith will say I give a veiled argument for secularism, and the latter will say I give a veiled argument for religion. I deny both. Each side presumes the basic ideas of constitutional democracy, so my suggestion is that we can make our political arguments in terms of public reason. Then we stand on common ground. That's how we can understand each other and cooperate.
John RawlsWhenever women protest and ask for their rights, they are silenced with the argument that the laws are justified under Islam. It is an unfounded argument. It is not Islam at fault, but rather the patriarchal culture that uses its own interpretations to justify whatever it wants.
Shirin Ebadi[T]here is only one sound argument for democracy, and that is the argument that it is a crime for any man to hold himself out as better than other men, and, above all, a most heinous offense for him to prove it.
H. L. MenckenWhen we're talking about feminism, I get sort of lost in the argument. Because as a woman of color, I don't know where I belong in this argument. Where do I say, 'I would be happy to have less money'? How do you fight for your rights when I'm super-grateful to be here at all?
Margaret ChoI dropped out of high school when I was 16, after I had a huge argument with my English teacher over the meaning of the word 'existentialism.'
Craig FergusonInvariably, it is this for which I write: the joy ... of an argument firmly made, like a nail straightly driven, its head flush to the plank.
George WillI do not teach history in my films. I don't have a linear point of view or argument. What I do in my films is to live the human experience; human, whether in Nazareth or anywhere else in the world.
Elia SuleimanMy hair and I had a really bad argument. She was being sprayed with alcohol and burnt with irons. She was being over processed and yanked and pulled by weave strings and suffocated by glue. She told me if I didn't straighten up and fly right that she was leaving.
Chrisette MicheleThere'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 NorthIn matters of great concern, and which must be done, there is no surer argument of a weak mind than irresolution; to be undetermined where the case is so plain, and the necessity so urgent. To be always intending to live a new life, but never to find time to set about it; this is as if a man should put off eating, and drinking, and sleeping, from one day and night to another, till he is starved and destroyed.
John TillotsonHe who knows only his own side of the case (argument) knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion
John Stuart MillCertainly Apple has improved enormously. At the beginning, the sampling rate was an issue for me, but a bigger argument was over digital rights, which I had.
Gail ZappaIn general, the men of lower intelligence won out. Afraid of their own shortcomings and of the intelligence of their opponents, so that they would not lose out in reasoned argument or be taken by surprise by their quick-witted opponents, they boldly moved into action. Their enemies,on the contrary, contemptuous and confident in their ability to anticipate, thought there was no need to take by action what they could win by their brains.
ThucydidesI followed his argument with the blank uneasiness which one might feel in the presence of a logical lunatic.
Victor SergeThe argument about marriage equality will one day seem as arcane and shocking to us as the fact that Rosa Parks had to get up and go to the back of the bus.
Uma ThurmanThere can be no argument about the Lone Star State's significant contributions to American history, and we must remember the actions and the sacrifices of those who made Texas independence a reality.
Michael McCaulIt is impossible to combat enthusiasm with reason; for though it makes a show of resistance, it soon eludes the pressure, refers you to distinctions not to be understood, and feelings which it cannot explain. A man who would endeavor to fix an enthusiast by argument might as well attempt to spread quicksilver with his finger.
Oliver GoldsmithThe argument has been made in Congress that it is slippery slope if you allow therapeutic, what people people are calling therapeutic cloning, then you will get reproductive cloning.
David BaltimoreUnlike liberalism, with its fundamental belief in the long-range power of ideas, conservatism is bound by the stock of ideas inherited at a given time. And since it does not really believe in the power of argument, its last resort is generally a claim to superior wisdom, based on some self-arrogated superior quality.
Friedrich August von HayekI was not a hard-liner against nuclear, because I viewed that as perhaps the only way we might keep the lights on another 25 years. But lately I am on board with Nicole Foss's argument that we will not have the capital or even the social cohesion to build anymore nuke plants.
James Howard KunstlerI even accept for the sake of argument that sexual orgies eliminate social tensions and ought to be encouraged.
Antonin ScaliaManagersโ typical response to my argument about free time is, โThatโs all well and good, but there are things I have to do.โ Yet we waste so much time in unproductive activityโit takes an enormous effort on the part of the leader to keep free time for the truly important things.
Dov FrohmanThere's no point going to a country which is torturing people to ask them to stop if they can point out that the United States is doing it too. It enormously weakens the argument. Back in the early days of the Bush administration, PEN made a decision that we would try and make human rights issues and civil rights issues in this country part of the priority, and not just international issues, which had more or less been the priority up until then.
Salman RushdieAs it is a great point of art, when our matter requires it, to enlarge and veer out all sail, so to take it in and contract it is of no less praise when the argument doth ask it.
Ben JonsonIn brief, I regard love as a more decisive focus of meaning than death. In terms of Heidegger's argument, this is because I think he misdescribes the importance of the deaths of others and focuses exclusively on my relation to my own death. But, in reality, the deaths of others have a more urgent and immediate impact on our lives than the purely notional knowledge that I too will one day die.
George PattisonAt bottom the world isn't a joke. We only joke about it to avoid an issue with someone, to let someone know that we know he's there with his questions; to disarm him by seeming to have heard and done justice to his side of the standing argument.
Robert FrostIn our swamp of media sensationalism and group-speak, BOSTON REVIEW stands out as a bold voice for reason and argument, one of the very, very few places that offers intelligence, integrity, and variety.
Martha C. NussbaumViolence is what people do when they run out of good ideas. It's attractive because it's simple, it's direct, it's almost always available as an option. When you can't think of a good rebuttal for your opponent's argument, you can always punch them in the face.
James S.A. CoreyIt's the spring of 2012, that the [Barak] Obama administration would be embracing the argument that the Affordable Care Act was a tax, and that was going to, itself, be a political albatross.
Donald Verrilli Jr.I am caught in a terrific bind of characterologically and rationally needing to think in the most comprehensive terms possible, forming a continuous system of argument with a gradient that runs from concrete to abstract, and unfortunately being caught also in a culture in which hardly anyone seems capable of applying himself to understand such a demanding form of argumentation.
Kenny SmithLeibniz accepted the argument that there must be indestructible simple entities if there is to be a complex world, but Epicurean morals and politics and anti-theology dismayed him. His 'monadology' which said that the true atoms of nature were unextended 'living mirrors,' was an imaginative and beautiful system, and even in many ways more modern than Epicurean atomism, than Epicurean atomism, but there was a reactionary aspect to it.
Catherine WilsonMy argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?
C. S. LewisThe law compells no man to impossible things. The argument ab impossibili is forcible in law.
Edward CokeIf 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 SorosSo how do theists respond to arguments like this? [The Argument from Evil] They say there is a reason for evil, but it is a mystery. Well, let me tell you this: I'm actually one hundred feet tall even though I only appear to be six feet tall. You ask me for proof of this. I have a simple answer: it's a mystery. Just accept my word for it on faith. And that's just the logic theists use in their discussions of evil.
Quentin Smith