Quotes About Argument

History is the art of making an argument about the past by telling a story accountable to evidence. In the writing of history, a story without an argument fades into antiquarianism; an argument without a story risks pedantry. Writing history requires empathy, inquiry, and debate. It requires forswearing condescension, cant, and nostalgia. The past isn’t quaint. Much of it, in fact, is bleak.

If you go to the right conservative places you'll find there's a huge argument about this among conservatives, particularly the conservative elites and the conservative intellectuals. There's always an argument among our people over who's the smartest person in the room and they're always trying to outsmart each other with the fanciest smartest most obscure argument. The fact is these arguments are taking place within the conservative movement I think quite a lot.

I like it when people are opinionated. I like an opinion. I like people that will fight for their opinion 'til an argument and through an argument. When they believe in something, they fight for it. I like those people that are perhaps sometimes too full of life - perhaps it's very difficult to be around them; they're not easy going. But I like being around people like that.

A 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.

If I'm in a political argument, I think I can, with reasonable accuracy and without boasting, put the other person's side of the case at least as well as they could. One has to be able to say that in any well-conducted argument.

The written argument endures. The oral argument is fleeting.

I'm not going to get in to an argument with anyone about the relative merits of Judaism and Christianity, and what it means for a Jewish kid to be a Christian - I'm just not interested in that argument.

When 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?

You never need an argument against the use of violence, you need an argument for it.

The argument about zoning and the presidency of Nigeria is like the philosophical argument of the egg or the hen. Who is older through the evolutionary process, who came first?

Invariably, 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.

Answer them critics with silence and indifference. It works better, I assure you, than anger and argument. . . .

There is little of the true philosophic spirit in Aquinas. He does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead.

There should be no argument in regard to morality in art. There is no morality in nature.

Rational argument does not create belief, but it maintains a climate in which belief may flourish.

An experience teaches only the good observer; but far from seeking a lesson in it, everyone looks for an argument in experience, and everyone interprets the conclusion in his own way.

Assertion is not argument; to contradict the statement of an opponent is not proof that you are correct.

Our kindness may be the most persuasive argument for that which we believe.

A good debater is not necessarily an effective vote-getter: you can find a hole in your opponent's argument through which you could drive a coach and four ringing jingle bells all the way, and thrill at the crystallization of a truth wrung out from a bloody dialogue - which, however, may warm only you and your muse, while the smiling paralogist has in the meantime made votes by the tens of thousands.

As sisters, they probably have closer to 99 percent in common, but they’re not about to recognize that. They’d rather fight over what kind of pet they’re going to get … It’s an argument for its own sake.

I followed his argument with the blank uneasiness which one might feel in the presence of a logical lunatic.

An 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.

Newspapers and their editors have to become as accountable as the rest of us - they are not 'a special case,' and they have only themselves to blame for having lost the argument for 'exceptionalism' - and with it the right to 'self-regulation.

Truth springs from argument amongst friends.

I keep hearing the argument that some things are constitutional while other things are not. The idea is that we should be in favor of all the things that were decided over 200 years ago by a bunch of slave-owning cross-dressers who pooped in holes.

There is no such thing as a convincing argument, although every man thinks he has one.

Matt 13:57. Then Jesus told them, 'A prophet is honored everywhere except in his own hometown and among his own family.' The other night I ate at a real nice family restaurant. Every table had an argument going.

The fact that the most powerful and significant connections in our lives are (at the time) invisible to us seems to me a compelling argument for religious reverence rather than skeptical empiricism as a response to life's meaning.

You do not settle whether an argument is justified by merely showing that it is of some use. The distinction is not between useful and useless experiments but between barbarous and civilized behaviour. Vivisection is a social evil because if it advances human knowledge, it does so at the expense of human character.

I have heard my fill of hurtful words. I think it's especially egregious when citizens like me, who point out abuses in their country, are referred to as 'do-gooders.' This is how a phrase that can be used to stop an argument dead becomes part of common usage.

Some 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.

As 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.

The photograph [of Che Guevara], for a civilization now accustomed to thinking in images, was not the description of a single event... it was an argument.

So long as an opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses in stability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it.

They believed that Britain was in Ireland defending their own interests, therefore the Irish had the right to use violence to put them out. My argument was that that type of thinking was out of date.

Arithmetic has a very great and elevating effect, compelling the soul to reason about abstract number, and rebelling against the introduction of visible or tngible objects into the argument.

The law compells no man to impossible things. The argument ab impossibili is forcible in law.

All fiction, if it's successful, is going to appeal to the emotions. Emotion is really what fiction is all about. That's not to say fiction can't be thoughtful, or present some interesting or provocative ideas to make us think. But if you want to present an intellectual argument, nonfiction is a better tool. You can drive a nail with a shoe but a hammer is a better tool for that. But fiction is about emotional resonance, about making us feel things on a primal and visceral level.

In general, I think every novel is a political novel, in that every novel is an argument about how the world works, who has power, who has a voice, what we should care about. But political novels can be boringly polemical if they end up being too black and white, too one dimensional, like war is bad, killing people is wrong.

I'd like to do policy and I'd like to do philosophy, I'd like to be able to get into the depth, into the meat of the argument - that's the kind of stuff I want to do.

You 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.

The reductio ad absurdum is God's favorite argument.

An argument would have begun to steam and boil and sputter - and you know how arguments end. Even if I had convinced him that he was wrong, his pride would have made it difficult for him to back down and give in.

Argument need not be heated; it can be punctuated with courteous smiles - or sympathetic tears.

He who takes nature for his guide, is not easily beaten out of his argument

People have long assumed that violence is necessary for political change. Rulers never cede power voluntarily, the argument goes, so progressives have no choice but to contemplate the use of force to bring about a better world, mindful of the trade-off between a small amount of violence now and acceptance of an unjust status quo indefinitely.

When confronted with a demand that the universe have a cause, infidels have usually pointed out that God was not much of an explanation. This is true enough, but not really a positive argument. After mechanistic explanation became popular, infidels liked to restrict causality to the chain of causes in an eternal material universe, pointing out that no supernatural cause was then necessary. Plausible, but still rather defensive. Today's skeptic can do better. In all likelihood, the universe is uncaused. It is random. It just is.

I think it would be a great improvement if there were no D&O insurance . The counter-argument is that no-one with any money would serve on a board. But I think net net you'd be better off.