Argument Quotes

Would you not say that peace is the greatest desire of true soldiers? Do we not have the most to lose from war? And businesses, most of them except military and oil ones, most of them have a vested interest in peace and prosperity. You cannot sell a house to a war refugee living in a tent, can you? Really hard tto sell an iPhone to a shattered victim. Businesses and corporatoons run this country. So yuou have to approach them with logic. Emotional appeals to the hippies of this world will not change minds. Stick to logic.- Shane Gibson, candidate for Governor, THE PLATOS ASCENSION BRIEF.

~ Earl Devere

There's a wonderful, perhaps apocryphal story that people tell about Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the brilliant, prickly, and iconoclastic late senator from New York. Apparently, Moynihan was in a heated argument with one of his colleagues over an issue, and the other senator, sensing he was on the losing side of the argument, blurted out: 'Well, you may disagree with me, Pat, I'm entitled to my own opinion. To which Moynihan frostily replied, You are entitled to you own opinion, but you are not entitled to you own facts.

~ Barack Obama

The absence of even rough agreement on the facts puts every opinion on equal footing and therefore eliminates the basis for thoughtful compromise. It rewards not those who are right, but those - like the White House press office - who can make their arguments most loudly, most frequently, most obstinately, and with the best backdrop.

~ Barack Obama

Any woman who is sure of her own wits, is a match, at any time, for a man who is not sure of his own temper.

~ Wilkie Collins

No sensible man ever engages, unprepared, in a fencing match of words with a woman.

~ Wilkie Collins

It's futile to point the finger of condemnation and say, Men... this or Women... that. Truth is, we are all guilty and innocent of many of life's trials.

~ T.f. Hodge

We may have different points of arguments from perspectives of belief, faith and religion.But we must not hate each other. We are one human family.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

To know if someone can speak offensively or politely, don’t give him poem to recite; don’t give him a song to sing. Just engage him in an argument and you will know it for yourself who he is.

~ Israelmore Ayivor

The business of art lies just in this, -- to make that understood and felt which, in the form of an argument, might be incomprehensible and inaccessible.

~ Leo Tolstoy

When there is no argument [dispute] over a talk, it is called ‘Principle’.

~ Dada Bhagwan

I think it’s important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. [With analogy] we are doing this because it’s like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. [With first principles] you boil things down to the most fundamental truths…and then reason up from there.

~ Elon Musk

If two men on the same job agree all the time, then one is useless. If they disagree all the time, both are useless.

~ Darryl F. Zanuck

Silence is the invisibility of talking. I'd take half an argument over half a silence any day. And I'd take peace and quiet over a full-blown argument any other day, unless it's Tuesday.

~ Will Advise

There are 2 kinds of fighters: those who fight because they hate, and those who fight because they love.

~ Criss Jami

You can never win resentment with an argument—only love can do that.

~ Debasish Mridha

There are answers which, in turning away wrath, only send it to the other end of the room, and to have a discussion coolly waived when you feel that justice is all on your own side is even more exasperating in marriage than in philosophy.

~ George Eliot

Mandy, I hardly think this was appropriate, not after… you know… after the funeral we haven’t had the money for any of your weird little games and I was hoping you’d be more mature now that Jud’s gone,” her father had disappointedly added. “How much’d that cake cost you?”“It’s paid for,” Mandy had argued, but her voice had sounded tiny in the harbour wind. “I used the cash from my summer job at Frenchy’s last year and I… it was my birthday, dad!”“You can’t even be normal about this one thing, can you?” her father had complained.Mandy hadn’t cried, she’d only stared back knowingly, her voice shaky. “…I’m normal.

~ Rebecca Mcnutt

When it comes to moral dilemmas and matters of discerning right justice, my natural sympathy so often happens to land on the opposite end of that of most of my peers. I sometimes wonder if this is nothing more than the misguidedness and the wickedness of my own heart. I wonder other times if God wires some of us in such a way so that fair discourse might then be provided, so that honest and unbiased, due process is ultimately more likely to be carried out. Perhaps it is all necessary for variance of perception, for mindful debate: that the heart is meant to create a bit of bias on certain issues; as between one another, they weigh and balance. For not all hearts are the same.

~ Criss Jami

The best thing to do when someone is trying to argue with you is to repeatedly state Stay Away and video record the entire event. You may need that video for the police afterwords when the aggressor starts fabricating fantasies about the event.

~ Steven Magee

Don't fight to be right, but fight when you are right.

~ Amit Kalantri

It was a bad idea to play chicken with someone who'd known you your whole life. Nobody came out a winner.

~ Alwyn Hamilton

If the Pentateuch be true, religious persecution is a duty. The dungeons of the Inquisition were temples, and the clank of every chain upon the limbs of heresy was music in the ear of God. If the Pentateuch was inspired, every heretic should be destroyed; and every man who advocates a fact inconsistent with the sacred book, should be consumed by sword and flame.In the Old Testament no one is told to reason with a heretic, and not one word is said about relying upon argument, upon education, nor upon intellectual development—nothing except simple brute force. Is there to-day a christian who will say that four thousand years ago, it was the duty of a husband to kill his wife if she differed with him upon the subject of religion? Is there one who will now say that, under such circumstances, the wife ought to have been killed? Why should God be so jealous of the wooden idols of the heathen? Could he not compete with Baal? Was he envious of the success of the Egyptian magicians? Was it not possible for him to make such a convincing display of his power as to silence forever the voice of unbelief? Did this God have to resort to force to make converts? Was he so ignorant of the structure of the human mind as to believe all honest doubt a crime? If he wished to do away with the idolatry of the Canaanites, why did he not appear to them? Why did he not give them the tables of the law? Why did he only make known his will to a few wandering savages in the desert of Sinai? Will some theologian have the kindness to answer these questions? Will some minister, who now believes in religious liberty, and eloquently denounces the intolerance of Catholicism, explain these things; will he tell us why he worships an intolerant God? Is a god who will burn a soul forever in another world, better than a christian who burns the body for a few hours in this? Is there no intellectual liberty in heaven? Do the angels all discuss questions on the same side? Are all the investigators in perdition? Will the penitent thief, winged and crowned, laugh at the honest folks in hell? Will the agony of the damned increase or decrease the happiness of God? Will there be, in the universe, an eternal auto da fe?

~ Robert G. Ingersoll

She had been in situations like this, where people said, Convince me, and in none of those had they actually wanted to be convinced. She could lay down a perfect argument and they just invented new bullshit on the spot to justify why the answer was still no. When people said, Convince me, she knew it didn’t mean they had an open mind. It meant they had power and wanted to enjoy it a minute.

~ Max Barry

During the flames of controversy, opinions, mass disputes, conflict, and world news, sometimes the most precious, refreshing, peaceful words to hear amidst all the chaos are simply and humbly 'I don't know.

~ Criss Jami

You and I both know that love is for children,'' he said. ''We're adults. Compatibility is for adults.''''Compatibility is for my Bluetooth and my car,'' Teresa replied. ''Only they get along just fine, and my car never makes my bluetooth feel like shit.

~ Maggie Stiefvater

To write is to reveal oneself.When I write something, fiction or non-fiction, I do not expect you to accept what I write, nor to agree with what I propose.I expect you to spend at least a tenth of a second to think about it - may be not about the characters, nor about the piece, but at least about the idea.

~ Sanhita Baruah

I wasn’t in the mood for a fight, but fights weren’t always conveniently scheduled. (Jessica)

~ Shannon A. Thompson

Arguing is a waste of time, because our attitudes need a quantum leap, not our knowledge. Arguing is a sport at best and a bad attitude at worst.

~ Stefan Emunds

Those who plead their cause in the absence of an opponent can invent to their heart's content, can pontificate without taking into account the opposite point of view and keep the best arguments for themselves, for aggressors are always quick to attack those who have no means of defence.

~ Christine De Pizan

It's a silly argument, and unnecessary. Creativity doesn't happen in here or out there but in the spaces in between. Creativity is a relationship, one that unfolds at the intersection of person and place.

~ Eric Weiner

Some things that goes out of your mouth can wrap itself around your neck and choke you to death in future.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Naturally, I always place my word over anyone else's simply because I know why I said what I said.

~ Criss Jami

When two men of science disagree, they do not invoke the secular arm; they wait for further evidence to decide the issue, because, as men of science, they know that neither is infallible. But when two theologians differ, since there is no criteria to which either can appeal, there is nothing for it but mutual hatred and an open or covert appeal to force.

~ Bertrand Russell

A man lives by believing something, not by debating and arguing about many things.

~ Thomas Carlyle

Rather than pound or a national mind that he believed had been closed by his critics, John Quincy Adams decided to seek a place in the is the esteem of future generations.

~ Paul C. Nagel

Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty—or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne’s thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or ‘Eurocentric’; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the ‘radical’; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly ‘committ

~ Christopher Hitchens

Definitions are the foundation of reason. You can’t reason without them.

~ Robert M. Pirsig

Don’t rush to justify yourself with a verbal argument, your choice of words may unmake what you made.

~ Israelmore Ayivor

Words are what you fight with but what you fight about is whether or not you’re afraid of them.

~ David Mitchell

Lincoln had entirely outgrown juvenile delight in religious argument. Talking with God seemed to the mature Lincoln more important than talking about Him.

~ Elton Trueblood