quotations about arguments & arguing
Much virtue in If.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
As You Like It
Treating your adversary with respect is giving him an advantage to which he is not entitled.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
Life of Samuel Johnson
In argument
Similes are like songs in love:
They must describe; they nothing prove.
MATTHEW PRIOR
Alma
We may convince others by our arguments; but we can only persuade them by their own.
JOSEPH JOUBERT
Pensées
If he take you in hand, sir, with an argument,
He'll bray you in a mortar.
BEN JONSON
The Alchemist
No sensible man ever engages, unprepared, in a fencing match of words with a woman.
WILKIE COLLINS
The Woman in White
You are fond of argument, and now you fancy that I am a bag full of arguments.
SOCRATES
Theaetetus
There is no good in arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat.
J.R. LOWELL
Democracy and Other Addresses
Argument is a gift of Nature.
CHARLES DICKENS
Barnaby Rudge
When a man who is drinking neat gin starts talking about his mother he is past all argument.
C.S. FORESTER
The African Queen
In arguing, answer your opponent's earnest with jest and his jest with earnest.
ARISTOTLE
Rhetoric
Never maintain an argument with heat and clamour, though you think or know yourself to be in the right.
LORD CHESTERFIELD
letter, October 16, 1747
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
I have found you an argument; but I am not obliged to find you an understanding.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
Life of Samuel Johnson
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
Just consider how terrible the day of your death will be
Others will go on speaking and you will not be able to argue back
RAM MOHAN ROY
attributed, Africa Quarterly, 2006
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
Bombs to settle arguments, the order of the boot
Can you hear them crying in the rubble of Beirut?
THE SPECIALS
"War Crimes"
If ifs and ands were pots and pans
There'd be no work for the tinkers.
ROBERT BLACKHOUSE PEACOCK
A glossary of the dialect of the hundred of Lonsdale
To make the weaker argument the stronger.
PLATO
Apology of Socrates