-
My argument would be that I don't think there is much that's genuinely political art that is good art.
Author:
Thom Yorke
-
Bluster, sputter, question, cavil; but be sure your argument be intricate enough to confound the court.
Author:
William Wycherley
-
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
-
Their argument is that most shows are losers, which is true, but it's also disingenuous to say, 'We are not going to take the risk unless it is totally covered by the few successful shows that are out there.'
Author:
Dick Wolf
-
Never preach a sermon without a text from the Bible, a text containing the theme which you can elaborate. The text is the best proof in support of your argument. A sermon without a text is an argument without a proof.
Author:
Isaac Wise
-
A flourishing, morally credible media is a vital component in the maintenance of genuinely public talk, argument about common good.
Author:
Rowan Williams
-
Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.
Author:
Rebecca West
-
Keep cool; anger is not an argument.
Author:
Daniel Webster
-
We must reinforce argument with results.
Author:
Booker Washington
-
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
-
History is full of really good stories. That's the main reason I got into this racket: I want to make the argument that history is interesting.
Author:
Sarah Vowell
-
Never argue at the dinner table, for the one who is not hungry always gets the best of the argument.
Author:
Voltaire
-
Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.
Author:
Leonardo Vinci
-
On the other hand, it is not fair to say that changes in federal policy have caused our tuition to rise faster. Every economic argument imaginable would indicate that we should raise tuition at a faster rate than we do.
Author:
Charles Vest
-
To be able to bear provocation is an argument of great reason, and to forgive it of a great mind.
Author:
John Tillotson
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
The more a race is governed by its passions, the less it has acquired the habit of cautious and reasoned argument, the more intense will be its love of music.
Author:
Stendhal
-
Argument is to me the air I breathe. Given any proposition, I cannot help believing the other side and defending it.
Author:
Gertrude Stein
-
An argument fatal to the communist theory, is suggested by the fact, that a desire for property is one of the elements of our nature.
Author:
Herbert Spencer
-
Similes prove nothing, but yet greatly lighten and relieve the tedium of argument.
Author:
Robert South
-
There's always that argument to make - that you're in better company historically if people don't understand what you're doing.
Author:
Elliott Smith
-
The main point for me is moral; animals are sentient beings. I know for some this is a hard argument to accept, but we're not built to eat a lot of meat.
Author:
Grace Slick
-
Go beyond science, into the region of metaphysics. Real religion is beyond argument. It can only be lived both inwardly and outwardly.
Author:
Swami Sivananda
-
Ridicule is the first and last argument of a fool.
Author:
Charles Simmons
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
Theses officers were good friends, so it must have been a terrible argument, because the one who played chess with my father was so angry that he walked over to the dentist's house and got the dentist out of bed and shot him.
Author:
Bruno Schulz
-
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
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Be able to analyze statistics, which can be used to support or undercut almost any argument.
Author:
Marilyn Savant
-
Capital punishment is the source of many an argument, both good and bad.
Author:
Marilyn Savant
-
A common creation demands a common sacrifice, and perhaps not the least potent argument in favour of a constructed international language is the fact that it is equally foreign, or apparently so, to the traditions of all nationalities.
Author:
Edward Sapir
-
Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.
Author:
George Santayana
-
The best way to win an argument is to begin by being right.
Author:
William Ruckelshaus
-
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 methods of peace propaganda which aim at establishing peace doctrine by argument and by creating a feeling favorable to peace in general seem to fall short of reaching the springs of human action and of dealing with the causes of the conduct which they seek to modify.
Author:
Elihu Root
-
The mere assemblage of peace loving people to interchange convincing reasons for their common faith, mere exhortation and argument to the public in favor of peace in general fall short of the mark.
Author:
Elihu Root
-
People's minds are changed through observation and not through argument.
Author:
Will Rogers
-
Discussion is an exchange of knowledge; an argument an exchange of ignorance.
Author:
Robert Quillen
-
The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers.
Author:
Carroll Quigley
-
No references to the need to fight terror can be an argument for restricting human rights.
Author:
Vladimir Putin
-
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 rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude.
Author:
Karl Popper
-
A strong argument for the religion of Christ is this - that offences against Charity are about the only ones which men on their death-beds can be made - not to understand - but to feel - as crime.
Author:
Edgar Poe
-
The argument we always used to use was that keeping records in the catalog was good for people that were coming new to the music, but I think that was talking over a ten year or fifteen year time span.
Author:
Evan Parker
-
The argument of the broken window pane is the most valuable argument in modern politics.
Author:
Emmeline Pankhurst
-
That God cannot lie, is no advantage to your argument, because it is no proof that priests can not, or that the Bible does not.
Author:
Thomas Paine
-
Another argument, vaguer and even less persuasive, is that gay marriage somehow does harm to heterosexual marriage. I have yet to meet anyone who can explain to me what this means. In what way would allowing same-sex partners to marry diminish the marriages of heterosexual couples?
Author:
Ted Olson
-
Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we're hardwired not to always think clearly when we're scared. And the country's scared.
Author:
Barack Obama
-
Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we're hardwired not to always think clearly when we're scared.
Author:
Barack Obama
-
The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.
Author:
Friedrich Nietzsche
-
I do insist on making what I hope is sense so there's always a coherent narrative or argument that the reader can follow.
Author:
Howard Nemerov
-
But, you know, there's still an argument, there's still ten states that outlaw premarital sex, and many more states where adultery is still outlawed and a crime.
Author:
Liam Neeson
-
I later spent... five to eight months in hospitals in New Jersey, always on an involuntary basis, and always attempting a legal argument for release.
Author:
John Nash, Jr.
-
As set forth by theologians, the idea of 'God' is an argument that assumes its own conclusions, and proves nothing.
Author:
Johann Most
-
It was an argument of rare power and eloquence.
Author:
William Moody
-
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
-
He who establishes his argument by noise and command shows that his reason is weak.
Author:
Michel Montaigne
-
I've chosen my wedding ring large and heavy to continue forever. But exactly because of that all the time that Dave and I have an argument I feel it like handcuffs, and on anger time I throw it in a basket. Poor Dave, he bought me three wedding rings already!
Author:
Carmen Miranda
-
The argument for intelligent design basically depends on saying, 'You haven't answered every question with evolution,'... Well, guess what? Science can't answer every question.
Author:
Kenneth Miller
-
The scientific argument advanced for intelligent design at the Dover trial, those arguments collapsed, scientifically and intellectually.
Author:
Kenneth Miller
-
Their argument, and I think it's a correct one, is that they'll make more money from the trades and the hardcovers if nobody messes with the creative team.
Author:
Mark Millar
-
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
Author:
H. Mencken
-
I explain this not for publicity, nor seeking to win an argument of right or wrong, I explain so that the record is clear as to my thinking and motivations in bombing a government installation.
Author:
Timothy McVeigh
-
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
-
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
-
There can be no argument about the Lone Star State's significant contributions to American history, and we must remember the actions and the sacrifices of those who made Texas independence a reality.
Author:
Michael McCaul
-
I now add, farther, that the apostle's argument is so far from proving it to be the duty of people to obey, and submit to, such rulers as act in contradiction to the public good, and so to the design of their office, that it proves the direct contrary.
Author:
Jonathan Mayhew
-
The difficult part in an argument is not to defend one's opinion but rather to know it.
Author:
Andre Maurois
-
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
-
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
-
A half truth, like half a brick, is always more forcible as an argument than a whole one. It carries better.
Author:
Stephen Leacock
-
In argument, truth always prevails finally; in politics, falsehood always.
Author:
Walter Landor
-
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.
Author:
Jonathan Krohn
-
AIDS is an absolutely tragic disease. The argument about AIDS' being some kind of divine retribution is crap.
Author:
Calvin Klein
-
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
-
After granting amnesty to illegals 20 years ago, we have gone from 3 million illegals to 11 million illegals. Our government has been fooled once by this amnesty argument, let us not be fooled again.
Author:
Ric Keller
-
In argument similes are like songs in love; they describe much, but prove nothing.
Author:
Franz Kafka
-
The aim of argument, or of discussion, should not be victory, but progress.
Author:
Joseph Joubert
-
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
-
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
-
Truth springs from argument amongst friends.
Author:
David Hume
-
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
-
The sounder your argument, the more satisfaction you get out of it.
Author:
Edward Howe
-
One could drive a prairie schooner through any part of his argument and never scrape against a fact.
Author:
David Houston
-
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
-
Sometimes we deny being worthy of praise, hoping to generate an argument we would be pleased to lose.
Author:
Cullen Hightower
-
No matter what side of an argument you're on, you always find some people on your side that wish you were on the other side.
Author:
Jascha Heifetz
-
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
-
My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.
Author:
Thomas Hardy
-
Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.
Author:
Thomas Hardy
-
Anger is seldom without argument but seldom with a good one.
Author:
Lord Halifax
-
Convincing yourself doesn't win an argument.
Author:
Robert Half
-
The best way I know of to win an argument is to start by being in the right.
Author:
Lord Hailsham
-
Silence is argument carried out by other means.
Author:
Che Guevara
-
In one sense I feel that my book is a one-woman argument against determinism.
Author:
Susan Griffin
-
The argument that somehow we've got to get rid of minority scholarships so that we can have a free and fair America implies that we have a colorblind society where minorities are equal in their pursuit of funds to go to school.
Author:
William Gray
-
Don't take the wrong side of an argument just because your opponent has taken the right side.
Author:
Baltasar Gracian
-
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
-
Men are apt to mistake the strength of their feeling for the strength of their argument. The heated mind resents the chill touch and relentless scrutiny of logic.
Author:
William Gladstone
-
The idea that a congressman would be tainted by accepting money from private industry or private sources is essentially a socialist argument.
Author:
Newt Gingrich
-
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
-
Anger is never without an argument, but seldom with a good one.
Author:
Indira Gandhi
-
When I'm alone, I can sleep crossways in bed without an argument.
Author:
Zsa Gabor
-
My father had kicked me out of his house at the height of an argument over an opinion difference. He had become so enraged. He told me never to come back, and that was all the severance it took.
Author:
Lynette Fromme
-
For your own good is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction.
Author:
Janet Frame
-
I say, If everybody in this house lives where it's God first, friends and family second and you third, we won't ever have an argument.
Author:
Jeff Foxworthy
-
The most powerful argument of all for saving open space is economics; in most states, tourism is the number two industry.
Author:
Jim Fowler
-
The argument of the strongest is always the best.
Author:
Jean Fontaine
-
No one can persuade another to change. Each of us guards a gate of change that can only be opened from the inside. We cannot open the gate of another, either by argument or emotional appeal.
Author:
Marilyn Ferguson
-
It's all very boring to say that we get along great and all that and sometimes we mock up come aggravation to make it interesting but the truth of it is that we get along so well we've never had an argument.
Author:
Dave Edmunds
-
This band has never had an argument. It's just amazing.
Author:
Dave Edmunds
-
A knock-down argument; 'tis but a word and a blow.
Author:
John Dryden
-
At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed.
Author:
Frederick Douglass
-
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
-
Any time three New Yorkers get into a cab without an argument, a bank has just been robbed.
Author:
Phyllis Diller
-
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
-
It's the duty of a lawyer to represent anyone for whom a responsible argument could be made.
Author:
Lloyd Cutler
-
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
-
Even in the beginning, when we knew there was a legal argument about how much our song sounds like his song, as one songwriter to another, I wasn't sure that Cat Stevens would take that as bad.
Author:
Wayne Coyne
-
After an argument, silence may mean acceptance or the continuation of resistance by other means.
Author:
Mason Cooley
-
He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense.
Author:
Joseph Conrad
-
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
-
I don't accept the argument of people like David Horowitz that the government should impose some sort of predetermined political balance on academic research.
Author:
Juan Cole
-
Truthiness is tearing apart our country, and I don't mean the argument over who came up with the word. I don't know whether it's a new thing, but it's certainly a current thing, in that it doesn't seem to matter what facts are. It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything.
Author:
Stephen Colbert
-
The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
Author:
Winston Churchill
-
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
-
A day without an argument is like an egg without salt.
Author:
Angela Carter
-
There's a great argument about how many men he actually killed. People would tell stories and then as we all know as stories get told over and over again, they get embellished, facts get changed, elaborated upon, exaggerated.
Author:
Keith Carradine
-
The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.
Author:
Dale Carnegie
-
When you let someone else win an argument, often you both end up winners.
Author:
Richard Carlson
-
The other night I ate at a real nice family restaurant. Every table had an argument going.
Author:
George Carlin
-
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
-
Neither irony or sarcasm is argument.
Author:
Samuel Butler
-
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.
Author:
T-Bone Burnett
-
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
-
If this phrase of the 'balance of power' is to be always an argument for war, the pretext for war will never be wanting, and peace can never be secure.
Author:
John Bright
-
I passionately believe that's it's not just what you say that counts, it's also how you say it - that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it.
Author:
Alain Botton
-
I have found you an argument; I am not obliged to find you an understanding.
Author:
James Boswell
-
Argument is meant to reveal the truth, not to create it.
Author:
Edward Bono
-
The conservative argument is that the economy is like the weather, that it just operates automatically.
Author:
Sidney Blumenthal
-
It depends on the situation. I mean, on one hand there's the argument that people should be left alone on the other hand, there's the argument to wade in a stop slaughters in places like Bosnia and Kosovo and what we probably should have done in Rwanda.
Author:
Jello Biafra
-
Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.
Author:
Wendell Berry
-
No matter what side of the argument you are on, you always find people on your side that you wish were on the other.
Author:
Thomas Berger
-
I think what I and most other sociologists of religion wrote in the 1960s about secularization was a mistake. Our underlying argument was that secularization and modernity go hand in hand. With more modernization comes more secularization.
Author:
Peter Berger
-
Behind every argument is someone's ignorance.
Author:
Robert Benchley
-
Euclid taught me that without assumptions there is no proof. Therefore, in any argument, examine the assumptions.
Author:
E. Bell
-
It is more noble by silence to avoid an injury than by argument to overcome it.
Author:
Francis Beaumont
-
The argument has been made in Congress that it is slippery slope if you allow therapeutic, what people people are calling therapeutic cloning, then you will get reproductive cloning.
Author:
David Baltimore
-
Every argument on lynching in the South gets back sooner or later to the question of rape.
Author:
Ray Baker
-
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
-
Argument is conclusive, but it does not remove doubt, so that the mind may rest in the sure knowledge of the truth, unless it finds it by the method of experiment.
Author:
Roger Bacon
-
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
-
Shrines! Shrines! Surely you don't believe in the gods. What's your argument? Where's your proof?
Author:
Aristophanes
-
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
-
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
-
The first and continuing argument for the curtailment of working hours and the raising of the minimum age was that education was necessary in a democracy and working children could not attend school.
Author:
Grace Abbott
