Quotes About Persuasion

Tears are not arguments.

Nothing is more certain than much of the force; as well as grace, of arguments or instructions depends their conciseness.

There's nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view that I hold dear.

I never lost an argument and my parents assumed I would be a lawyer. They cast me in that role.

Don't start an argument with somebody who has a microphone when you don't. They'll make you look like chopped liver.

Academics don't normally manage to alter people's way of thinking through their strength of argument.

A master salesman is one who takes the offensive and never the defensive sale of an argument, if argument arises.

Who over-refines his argument brings himself to grief

The number of arguments is unimportant unless some of them are correct.

Obama's major accomplishment is himself. This can be an effective argument to make to undecided voters and something Obama has to artfully address.

In arguing one should meet serious pleading with humor, and humor with serious pleading.

When an arguer argues dispassionately he thinks only of the argument.

The best way to win an argument is to begin by being right.

I try to turn a written thing, when I'm in trouble with it, into a spoken thing: I start imagining what I would say to someone if I were trying to tell the story or make the argument.

Those whose cause is just will never lack good arguments.

Epithets are not arguments. Abuse does not persuade.

Even a nod from a person who is esteemed is of more force than a thousand arguments or studied sentences from others.

If you have a very commanding argument that you cannot refute, not to accept the argument is to act irrationally.

A gun is not an argument.

A witty illustration or an apt story will accomplish more than columns of argument.

I never saw an instance of one or two disputants convincing the other by argument.

If you can't reduce your argument to a few crisp words and phrases, there's something wrong with your argument.

I have noticed that no sooner do people embark on a course of action which they do not find wholly satisfactory than they muster every argument to persuade others to imitate it.

I'm vey bad at marshaling arguments. I can't, at a dinner party, explain why I'm a socialist and why others should be socialists as well.