Quotes About Argument

Lawyers-a profession it is to disguise matters.

Everybody thinks they are right

There's Insanity on Both Sides of the Debate When You Argue with an Idiot.

Nothing has an uglier look to us than reason, when it is not on our side.

Who is apt, on occasion, to assign a multitude of reasons when one will do? This is a sure sign of weakness in argument.

If someone puts his trust in God in a matter, let him not argue with his brother about it.

History is furious debate informed by evidence and reason.

Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor. Which is one very strong argument in favor of matrimony.

Laugh as much as you choose, but you will not laugh me out of my opinion.

The good lawyer is the great salesman.

When you don't know what you believe, everything becomes an argument. Everything is debatable. But when you stand for something, decisions are obvious. For

When you don't know what you believe, everything becomes an argument. Everything is debatable. But when you stand for something, decisions are obvious.

Our colleague Roger Fisher captured this phenomenon in a wry reflection on his days as a litigator : "I sometimes failed to persuade the court that I was right, but I never failed to persuade myself!

They called themselves The Souls. They told Ms. Olinski that they were The Souls before they were a team, but she told them that they were a team as soon as they became The Souls. Then after a while, teacher and team agreed that they were arguing chicken-or-egg. Whichever way it began--chicken-or-egg, team-or-The Souls--it definitely ended with an egg. Definitely, an egg.

Even such a seemingly trivial and normal thing as the compulsive need to be right in an argument and make the other person wrong- defending the mental position with which you have identified- is due to fear of death [of the ego].

Even such a seemingly trivial and normal thing as the compulsive need to be right in an argument and make the other person wrong- defending the mental position with which you have identified- is due to fear of death.

For example, even such a seemingly trivial and "normal" thing as the compulsive need to be right in an argument and make the other person wrong — defending the mental position with which you have identified — is due to the fear of death. If you identify with a mental position, then if you are wrong, your mind-based sense of self is seriously threatened with annihilation.

The one thing that astonished him now was that he should have stood for five minutes arguing with her across the width of the room, when just touching her made everything so simple.

You idiot! said his wife, and threw down her cards.

An Englishman is the unfittest person on earth to argue another Englishman into slavery.

the bitter heart-burnings, and the war of tongues, which is so often the prelude to other wars.

It may be that Japanese culture is not ego-based like Western culture: argument has often a strong ego base. The most likely explanation is that Japanese culture was not influenced by those Greek thinking idioms which were refined and developed by medieval monks as a means of proving heretics to be wrong. (p36)

In real-life situations apparently logical lines of argument are often (not always) based on an inability to see alternative possibilities. In a similar way the ability to think of an alternative explanation is by far the best way of destroying the arrogance of an apparently logical line of argument.

A person who knows all the answers, has an opinion on everything, has a certainty backed up by rational argument, has very little possibility of further progress. Such a person is unlikely to walk away from a discussion with anything more than a reaffirmation of how right he or she has been all along.