Quotes on Argument

The argument on the other side of special rights is completely bogus. It's bogus because you could make exactly the same claim about racial or ethnic or religious minorities.

Author: Tom Allen

Observe which side resorts to the most vociferous name-calling and you are likely to have identified the side with the weaker argument and they know it.

Author: Charles Anderson

I do not have a brain that I long for in dealing with matters of which I am ignorant, that don't come within my ken and a rationale, a reason, and argument and so on, and I can't do that and I'm not in that bracket at all.

Author: Richard Attenborough

For if any man who never saw fire proved by satisfactory arguments that fire burns. His hearer's mind would never be satisfied, nor would he avoid the fire until he put his hand in it that he might learn by experiment what argument taught.

Author: Roger Bacon

Every argument on lynching in the South gets back sooner or later to the question of rape.

Author: Ray Baker

It is more noble by silence to avoid an injury than by argument to overcome it.

Author: Francis Beaumont

Euclid taught me that without assumptions there is no proof. Therefore, in any argument, examine the assumptions.

Author: E. Bell

Behind every argument is someone's ignorance.

Author: Robert Benchley

Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.

Author: Wendell Berry

The conservative argument is that the economy is like the weather, that it just operates automatically.

Author: Sidney Blumenthal

I have found you an argument; I am not obliged to find you an understanding.

Author: James Boswell

Given the difficulty of resisting such temptations over the longer run, a proper concern for the welfare of congressional souls may well be the ultimate argument in favor of term limitations.

Author: James Buckley

Neither irony or sarcasm is argument.

Author: Samuel Butler

I remember having an argument with Alan, I said the Queen's not just going to call the guy up and send him out to do it. And Alan says, well, how would a monarch give orders to her assassin.

Author: Eddie Campbell

When you let someone else win an argument, often you both end up winners.

Author: Richard Carlson

The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.

Author: Dale Carnegie

A day without an argument is like an egg without salt.

Author: Angela Carter

The best argument for mutual funds is that they offer safety and diversification. But they don't necessarily offer safety and diversification.

Author: Ron Chernow

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

Author: Winston Churchill

George W. Bush bought the election - period. End of story. There is no argument. You can try to come up with any argument you can, but there is none.

Author: Gary Coleman

Any political agenda and organization which doesn't begin with personal responsibility is just half the argument. It's just not going to succeed.

Author: Peter Coyote

It's the duty of a lawyer to represent anyone for whom a responsible argument could be made.

Author: Lloyd Cutler

I became the stage for the great argument between Nietzsche and Rousseau. I was the extra ready to take on all the roles.

Author: Jacques Derrida

Lincoln had no such person that he could talk with. Often, as a result, he debated with himself, and he would draw up a kind of list of the pros and cons of an argument, and carefully figure them out, and he might test them in public.

Author: David Donald

A knock-down argument; 'tis but a word and a blow.

Author: John Dryden

This band has never had an argument. It's just amazing.

Author: Dave Edmunds

The argument of the strongest is always the best.

Author: Jean Fontaine

The most powerful argument of all for saving open space is economics; in most states, tourism is the number two industry.

Author: Jim Fowler

For your own good is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction.

Author: Janet Frame

When I'm alone, I can sleep crossways in bed without an argument.

Author: Zsa Gabor

I don't feel that an atmosphere of debate and total disagreement and argument is such a bad thing. It makes for a vital and alive field.

Author: Clifford Geertz

If he who employs coercion against me could mould me to his purposes by argument, no doubt he would. He pretends to punish me because his argument is strong; but he really punishes me because his argument is weak.

Author: William Godwin

Don't take the wrong side of an argument just because your opponent has taken the right side.

Author: Baltasar Gracian

In one sense I feel that my book is a one-woman argument against determinism.

Author: Susan Griffin

Silence is argument carried out by other means.

Author: Che Guevara

The best way I know of to win an argument is to start by being in the right.

Author: Lord Hailsham

Convincing yourself doesn't win an argument.

Author: Robert Half

Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.

Author: Thomas Hardy

The most important thing 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 too much apparent loss of face.

Author: Sydney Harris

Sometimes we deny being worthy of praise, hoping to generate an argument we would be pleased to lose.

Author: Cullen Hightower

I don't accept at all the quite popular argument that the press is responsible for the monarchy's recent troubles. The monarchy's responsible for the monarchy's recent troubles. To blame the press is the old thing of blaming the messenger for the message.

Author: Anthony Holden

One could drive a prairie schooner through any part of his argument and never scrape against a fact.

Author: David Houston

The sounder your argument, the more satisfaction you get out of it.

Author: Edward Howe

You can make an argument that Bill O'Reilly is a conservative or a Republican. Bill's kind of unpredictable. Somebody might say that he would have been comfortable in the Democratic Party of Scoop Jackson.

Author: Brit Hume

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.

Author: John Hume

What convinces is conviction. Believe in the argument you're advancing. If you don't you're as good as dead. The other person will sense that something isn't there, and no chain of reasoning, no matter how logical or elegant or brilliant, will win your case for you.

Author: Lyndon Johnson

Myself when young did eagerly frequent doctor and saint, and heard great argument about it and about: but evermore came out by the same door as in I went.

Author: Omar Khayyam

AIDS is an absolutely tragic disease. The argument about AIDS' being some kind of divine retribution is crap.

Author: Calvin Klein

If you feel yourself to be above the mass, speak so as to raise the mass to the height of your argument.

Author: George Lewes

There is no good in arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat.

Author: James Lowell

The difficult part in an argument is not to defend one's opinion but rather to know it.

Author: Andre Maurois

First of all, you can make the argument that there's no such thing as the past. Nobody lived in the past.

Author: David McCullough

When blithe to argument I come, Though armed with facts, and merry, May Providence protect me from The fool as adversary, Whose mind to him a kingdom is Where reason lacks dominion, Who calls conviction prejudice And prejudice opinion.

Author: Phyllis McGinley

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

Author: H. Mencken

He who establishes his argument by noise and command shows that his reason is weak.

Author: Michel Montaigne

At the conclusion of my argument I received very high compliments from the Chief Justice and later from other of the Judges. What they said I do not care to repeat.

Author: William Moody

The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.

Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate and doubt, to offer a solution everybody can understand.

Author: Colin Powell

No references to the need to fight terror can be an argument for restricting human rights.

Author: Vladimir Putin

We are told that the possession of nuclear weapons - in some cases even the testing of these weapons - is essential for national security. But this argument can be made by other countries as well.

Author: Joseph Rotblat

The best way to win an argument is to begin by being right.

Author: William Ruckelshaus

Capital punishment is the source of many an argument, both good and bad.

Author: Marilyn Savant

Be able to analyze statistics, which can be used to support or undercut almost any argument.

Author: Marilyn Savant

My argument has always been that this is not an anti-Bush film, it's a pro-democracy film. And if Bush comes out on the wrong side of democracy, that's his problem.

Author: John Sayles

I suppose I was very disappointed that I was injured during training for Korea. In fact, I had an argument with a grenade and it won, and consequently I was forced to come back to Australia for twelve months.

Author: Peter Scott

There are clear cases in which "understanding" literally applies and clear cases in which it does not apply; and these two sorts of cases are all I need for this argument.

Author: John Searle

It is true that Mr. Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, after which there was a commitment to give 40 acres and a mule. That's where the argument, to this day, of reparations starts. We never got the 40 acres. We went all the way to Herbert Hoover, and we never got the 40 acres. We didn't get the mule. So we decided we'd ride this donkey as far as it would take us.

Author: Al Sharpton

John Foster Dulles had called on me in his capacity as Secretary of State, and he had exhausted every argument to persuade me to place Cambodia under the protection of the South East Asia Treaty Organization.

Author: Norodom Sihanouk

Bigotry and intolerance, silenced by argument, endeavors to silence by persecution, in old days by fire and sword, in modern days by the tongue.

Author: Charles Simmons

Ridicule is the first and last argument of a fool.

Author: Charles Simmons

Similes prove nothing, but yet greatly lighten and relieve the tedium of argument.

Author: Robert South

Argument is to me the air I breathe. Given any proposition, I cannot help believing the other side and defending it.

Author: Gertrude Stein

That's what we're missing. We're missing argument. We're missing debate. We're missing colloquy. We're missing all sorts of things. Instead, we're accepting.

Author: Studs Terkel

I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.

Author: Margaret Thatcher

Could I interrupt here, because there is an alternative explanation, which you are particularly well placed to examine. You know the argument that it is the alchemists in the laboratories who invent the sweet new kits.

Author: E. Thompson

To be able to bear provocation is an argument of great reason, and to forgive it of a great mind.

Author: John Tillotson

Never argue at the dinner table, for the one who is not hungry always gets the best of the argument.

Author: Voltaire

Admitting, however, for the sake of argument, that I am prime and sole minister in this country, am I, therefore, prime and sole minister of all Europe? Am I answerable for the conduct of other countries as well as for that of my own?

Author: Robert Walpole

We must reinforce argument with results.

Author: Booker Washington

A flourishing, morally credible media is a vital component in the maintenance of genuinely public talk, argument about common good.

Author: Rowan Williams

In Vegas, I got into a long argument with the man at the roulette wheel over what I considered to be an odd number.

Author: Steven Wright

Bluster, sputter, question, cavil; but be sure your argument be intricate enough to confound the court.

Author: William Wycherley