quotations about arguments & arguing
There is no good in arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat.
J.R. LOWELL
Democracy and Other Addresses
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
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
In all disputes, so much as there is of passion, so much there is of nothing to the purpose.
THOMAS BROWNE
Religio Medici
One single positive weighs more,
You know, than negatives a score.
MATTHEW PRIOR
Epistle to Fleetwood Shepherd
A noisy man is always in the right.
WILLIAM COWPER
Conversations
Bombs to settle arguments, the order of the boot
Can you hear them crying in the rubble of Beirut?
THE SPECIALS
"War Crimes"
When a thing ceases to be a subject of controversy, it ceases to be a subject of interest.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Works
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
Why do people always assume that volume will succeed when logic won't?
L.J. SMITH
Nightfall
Treating your adversary with respect is giving him an advantage to which he is not entitled.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
Life of Samuel Johnson
Though we cannot out-vote them, we will out-argue them.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
Life of Samuel Johnson
For they are yet but ear-kissing arguments.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
King Lear
You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into.
BEN GOLDACRE
Bad Science
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"
Who over-refines his argument brings himself to grief.
PETRARCH
To Laura in Life
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
He'd undertake to prove, by force
Of argument, a man's no horse;
He'd prove a buzzard is no fowl,
And that a Lord may be an owl,
A calf an Alderman, a goose a Justice,
And rooks, Committee-men or Trustees.
SAMUEL BUTLER
Hudibras
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 am bound to furnish my antagonists with arguments, but not with comprehension.
BENJAMIN DISRAELI
speech to the House of Commons