Quotes About Argument

The art of arguing is the art of living. We argue because we must, because life emends it, because, in the end, life itself is but an argument.

Most arguments are useless.

We are afraid. But fear confirms life and identifies the source of every successful argument - ourselves.

My view of life is, that it's next to impossible to convince anybody of anything.

History is the art of making an argument about the past by telling a story accountable to evidence. In the writing of history, a story without an argument fades into antiquarianism; an argument without a story risks pedantry. Writing history requires empathy, inquiry, and debate. It requires forswearing condescension, cant, and nostalgia. The past isn't quaint. Much of it, in fact, is bleak.

History is the art of making an argument about the past by telling a story accountable to evidence.

debates staged that year between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas proved to be the greatest argument over the American experiment since the constitutional convention. Those debates didn't avert the coming war between the

But the university has obligations, too, to freedom of speech, whose premise, however idealized, is that, in a battle between truth and error, truth, in an open field will always win. If the commitment to these difficult freedoms has sometimes flagged...it has just as often been renewed. Free speech is not a week or a place. It is a long and strenuous argument, as maddening as the past and as painful as the truth.

I think it was Socrates who said if you can't win a one-way argument, just pretend that you can read your opponent's mind.

To quote Albert Einstein,' said Sherman, "You stink and so do your relatives." "Einstein never said that," argued Garfield. "Did too," Insisted Sherman. "It's in his theory of relativity.

You know what I'd love to read? A Dialogue between Bron and Shevek and Socrates. Socrates would love it too. I bet he wanted people who argued. You can tell he did, you can tell that's what he loved really, at least in The Symposium.

Yesterday's gone, so has the day before. Don't let's waste today arguing about it.

It seems to me (in the words of the narrator) that sexual equality has not yet been established on Earth and that (in the words of GBS) the only argument that can be made against it is that it has never been tried.

Lewis was an apologist from temper, from conviction, and from modesty. From temper, for he loved argument. From conviction, being traditionally orthodox. From modesty, because he laid no claim either to the learning which would have made him a theologian or to the grace which would have made him a spiritual guide.

The marks of this style are weight and clarity of argument, sudden turns of generalization and genial paradox, the telling short sentence to sum a complex paragraph, and unexpected touches of personal approach to the reader, whom he always assumes to be as logical, as learned, as romantic, and as open to conviction as himself. Not that in fact he was easily open to conviction; perhaps 'open to argument' would be a truer description.

Sometimes Peter and Tiger Lily fought. A fight between them looked like this: Peter, head swirling with anger, waving his arms around and expressing five thoughts at once about why she was wrong and he was right; Tiger Lily, curling up inside like a rock, stone-faced, listening but at the same time refusing to hear. She hated his need to always win and he hated her coldness during their arguments.

I am nothing to you, am I?' Peter said once in a particularly intense arguement about where to find wild turnips. To these kinds of accusations, Tiger Lily would reply thay he was trying to make her into his little chicken, and that she would never be anyone's 'little obedient chicken

Jonathan was tired of arguing with himself. He was obviously conversing with an idiot.

Everyone finds a way to make their side the right one, after all.

She poured out a measure but Temple declined. 'Drink and I have had some long and painful conversations and found we simply can't agree.' 'Drink and I can't agree either.' She shrugged and tossed it down herself. 'But we keep on having the argument.

But then it's difficult, isn't it, to make a passionate argument for what you already have? So boring. Whereas the delightful alternative? A bouquet of promises! A sackful of dreams! A glorious ship of fantasies, undamaged by collision with actually getting anything done.

It is an argument for moral equivalence, an argument that undermines faith, hope, and the belief that we can live up to the language of our Constitution.

I hate it when people insist on wrangling with you about something, then try to stop as soon as they see the arguments are no longer going all their way.

The moment a man uses a woman's sex to discredit her arguments, the thoughtful reader knows that he is unable to answer the arguments themselves.