Quotes About Sophistry

Peg and I are in the trenches of social media, not in a war room back at headquarters. We acquired our knowledge though experimentation and diligence, not pontification, sophistry, and conference attendance.

That Hegelian dialectics should provide a wonderful instrument for always being right, because they permit the interpretations of all defeats as the beginning of victory, is obvious. One of the most beautiful examples of this kind of sophistry occurred after 1933 when the German Communists for nearly two years refused to recognize that Hitler's victory had been a defeat for the German Communist Party.

Love supreme defies all sophistry.

He's no stranger to pretty words.

Satan is the master of the ultimate double-talk and sophistry. He calls evil good and continues to confuse men with his cleverly disguised untruths.

Fire is to represent truth because it destroys all sophistry and lies; and the mask is for lying and falsehood which conceal truth.

Puisque moi-même j'ai longtemps été un pensionnaire dans un asile d'aliénés, je ne peux que relever les tendances sophistes de certains pensionnaires qui les entraînent à se tromper en commettant les erreurs d'appliquer la non causa et ignoratio elenchi et qui consiste à mésestimer l'effet par ignorance de la cause.

The cry of revolt against such a god [a god which just affirms the world as it is] is nearer the truth than is the sophistry with which men attempt to justify him....

every country, it always is and must be the interest of the great body of the people to buy whatever they want of those who sell it cheapest. The proposition is so very manifest, that it seems ridiculous to take any pains to prove it; nor could it ever have been called in question, had not the interested sophistry of merchants and manufacturers confounded the common sense of mankind. Their interest is, in this respect, directly opposite to that of the great body of the people.

I hadn't heard such a ridiculous piece of sophistry since the days when the old shaykh who lived in a box in our alley in Algiers tried to prove that the entire Earth was flat because the city of Mecca was flat. Which it isn't.

The dangers of sophistry and scholasticism are present in the possibility of philosophy itself.

A sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity.

If there is one beast in all the loathsome fauna of civilization I hate and despise it is a man of the world.

Whenever sophistry and rhetoric fail they send in their poor White goons. They don't have the guts of real gangsters. The letters after their names are their tommy guns and those universities where they pour over syllables in the many cubicles, their Big House.

In fact, I do not believe there is an honest man alive without some pretension,

Men of great conversational powers almost universally practise a sort of lively sophistry and exaggeration which deceives for the moment both themselves and their auditors.

There was a moral infection of clap-trap in him.

He stooped to the evil of hypocrisy with others, sceptical of their innocence which he could cajole so easily.

Hillary Clinton was famous for her intimate friendship with Wall Street bankers. At one point she actually scolded Bernie Sanders for wanting to get tough with the financial industry because such a policy, by itself, would not also end racism and sexism—a new low in self-serving sophistry.

I confess I know not what a sceptic can answer to this, nor by what good argument he can plead even for a hearing; for either his reasoning is sophistry, and so deserves contempt; or there is no truth in the human faculties, and then why should we reason?

Even if that's just bullshit, sir, it's first-rate bullshit.

It was loopholery at its very best.

When someone tries to derail an argument with an insult, your response depends on who the audience is. If the two of you are alone, say something like, "This isn't recess. I'm out of here," and walk away. You're not about to persuade the jerk. But if there are bystanders, ridicule the insult. "So Bob's answer to the problem of noise in this town is that I'm a jerk. Was that helpful to you all?" You turn sophistry into genuine banter.

Sophistry is the fallacy of argument.