quotations about arguments & arguing
Brief and bitter the debate.
ROBERT BROWNING
Hervé Riel
Though we cannot out-vote them, we will out-argue them.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
Life of Samuel Johnson
Why do people always assume that volume will succeed when logic won't?
L.J. SMITH
Nightfall
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"
We arg'ed the thing at breakfast, we arg'ed the thing at tea,
And the more we arg'ed the question, the more we didn't agree.
WILL CARLETON
Betsy and I Are Out
We should not investigate facts by the light of arguments, but arguments by the light of facts.
MYSON
attributed, Lives of Eminent Philosophers
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
The tree of knowledge blasted by dispute,
Produces saples leaves instead of fruit.
JOHN DENHAM
Progress of Learning
In all disputes, so much as there is of passion, so much there is of nothing to the purpose.
THOMAS BROWNE
Religio Medici
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
Who over-refines his argument brings himself to grief.
PETRARCH
To Laura in Life
One single positive weighs more,
You know, than negatives a score.
MATTHEW PRIOR
Epistle to Fleetwood Shepherd
For they are yet but ear-kissing arguments.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
King Lear
Be calm in arguing: for fierceness makes
Error a fault and truth discourtesy....
Calmness is a great advantage: he that lets
Another chafe, may warm him at his fire.
GEORGE HERBERT
The Church-Porch
Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be--or to be indistinguishable from--self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.
NEAL STEPHENSON
Cryptonomicon
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
I have found you an argument; but I am not obliged to find you an understanding.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
Life of Samuel Johnson
Treating your adversary with respect is giving him an advantage to which he is not entitled.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
Life of Samuel Johnson
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