quotations about arguments & arguing
This is no time nor fitting place to mar
The mirthful meeting with a wordy war.
LORD BYRON
Lara
Why do people always assume that volume will succeed when logic won't?
L.J. SMITH
Nightfall
I am not arguing with you--I am telling you.
J. MCNEILL WHISTLER
The Gentle Art of Making Enemies
In all disputes, so much as there is of passion, so much there is of nothing to the purpose.
THOMAS BROWNE
Religio Medici
Brief and bitter the debate.
ROBERT BROWNING
Hervé Riel
There are two sides to every question.
PROTAGORAS
Protagoras
To make the weaker argument the stronger.
PLATO
Apology of Socrates
One single positive weighs more,
You know, than negatives a score.
MATTHEW PRIOR
Epistle to Fleetwood Shepherd
Debate destroys despatch.
JOHN DENHAM
Of Prudence
There is hardly a better way to avoid discussion than by releasing an argument from the control of the present and by saying that only the future will reveal its merits.
HANNAH ARENDT
The Origins of Totalitarianism
You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into.
BEN GOLDACRE
Bad Science
A noisy man is always in the right.
WILLIAM COWPER
Conversations
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"
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
You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.
JOHN MORLEY
On Compromise
When a thing ceases to be a subject of controversy, it ceases to be a subject of interest.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Works
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
A dispute begun in jest ... is continued by the desire of conquest, till vanity kindles into rage, and opposition rankles into enmity.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
The Idler, No. 23
Argument, of course, is the whole point of history. Disagreement; my word against yours; this evidence against that. If there were such a thing as absolute truth the debate would lose its lustre. I, for one, would no longer be interested.
PENELOPE LIVELY
Moon Tiger
But yet beware of councils when too full;
Number makes long disputes.
JOHN DENHAM
Of Prudence