Quotes About Polemic

When a comic becomes enamored with his own views and foists them off on the public in a polemic way, he loses not only his sense of humor but his value as a humorist.

Innovation, being avant garde, is always polemic.

Even a polemic has some justification if one considers that my own first poetic experiments began during a dictatorship and mark the origin of the Hermetic movement.

We often talk about this VAR, this new technology. It's very important new technology. On the pitch maybe it's not clear. You cannot see... maybe from another angle in front of the TV it's much more clear. But it's, as always, football. It's easy to be much more polemic about this and that.

'Up in the Air' is not a political movie. It won't be mistaken for either a Michael Moore or Any Rand polemic on capitalism.

I'm not a polemicist; I had no business writing a polemic.

Any work of architecture that has with it some discussion, some polemic, I think is good. It shows that people are interested, people are involved.

Conversion is a matter of the heart, not of the academy; polemics function more to "speak to the choir" and shore up internal unity rather than to facilitate understanding, let alone to show love of neighbor.

So even Cicero imagined moveable type, but only in his polemic as an absurd idea. He used the phrase formae literarum, and when moveable type was finally made some sixteen centuries later, that is the name they gave it—though it was not such an absurd idea after all.

The Eisenhower Memorial competition and project have stirred a remarkable polemic, the center of which is not President Eisenhower or Washington, D.C. but Mr. Gehry and the values he promulgates.

A play is basically a long, formalistic polemic. You can write it without the poetry, and if you do, you may have a pretty good play. We know this because we see plays in translation. Not many people speak Norwegian or Danish or whatever guys like Ibsen spoke, or Russian - yet we understand Chekhov and the others.

The death cry of that hen imprinted itself on the boy's memory so hauntingly that in 1958 he wrote an impassioned attack on the guillotine. As a result, in part, of that polemic, capital punishment was abolished in France. Who is to say, then, that the hen did not speak?

It is a frequent vice of radical polemic to assert, and even to believe, that once you have found the lowest motive for an antagonist, you have identified the correct one.

But I still read Shaw on a regular basis. What I love is the nakedness of the polemic and the irresistible good humour. For me, 'Major Barbara' is the greatest of all the plays in that it starts from the rational and proceeds to the ecstatic in a spectacular way, and leaves you very confused if you cling to Euclidean logic.

All my films have some kind of statement about something - but I have to coat it with entertainment to make it palatable. Otherwise it becomes a polemic, and people don't want to see it. If you're trying to get a message out to people, you've got to entertain them at the same time.

Without choice, love would be rendered meaningless. God is neither a cosmic rapist who forces his love on people, nor is he a cosmic puppeteer who forces people to love him. Instead, God, the personification of love, grants us the freedom to revel in his love or to loathe him. Such freedom provides a persuasive polemic for the existence of hell. If there is freedom then there must also be hell.

Any work of architecture that has with it some discussion, some polemic, I think is good. It shows that people are interested, people are involved.

Fiction can accommodate ambivalence as polemic cannot

The granddaddy of all countercultures, of course, was early Christianity itself. And in a polemic written in the 2nd century by the Greek philosopher Celsus, we have a marvelous document of the bewilderment and incomprehension with which Greco-Roman rationalists of the early Christian era viewed this counterculture.

In setting forth the current liberalism, now almost dominant in the Church, over against Christianity, we are animated, therefore, by no merely negative or polemic purpose; on the contrary—by showing what Christianity is not, we hope to be able to show what Christianity is in order that men may be led to turn from the weak and beggarly elements and have recourse again to the grace of God.

Marx and Engels never tried to refute their opponents with argument. They insulted, ridiculed, derided, slandered, and traduced them, and in the use of these methods their followers are not less expert. Their polemic is directed never against the argument of the opponent, but always against his person.

The concept of the polemic perhaps was at work in the biblical usage of the divine epithet "I am that I am." The God of Israel employed an originally Egyptian term for Re and Pharaoh to demonstrate that they are not sovereign and all-powerful; they do not run the universe. The name "I am that I am" truly and only belongs to the God of the Hebrews. He uniquely is the eternal, sovereign God of the universe!

Ethan was inspired by Jerry Mander's 1991 polemic In the Absence of the Sacred