ARGUMENT QUOTES III

quotations about arguments & arguing

No sensible man ever engages, unprepared, in a fencing match of words with a woman.

WILKIE COLLINS

The Woman in White


Treating your adversary with respect is giving him an advantage to which he is not entitled.

SAMUEL JOHNSON

Life of Samuel Johnson


Never maintain an argument with heat and clamour, though you think or know yourself to be in the right.

LORD CHESTERFIELD

letter, October 16, 1747


When a man who is drinking neat gin starts talking about his mother he is past all argument.

C.S. FORESTER

The African Queen


You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.

JOHN MORLEY

On Compromise


Be calm in arguing: for fierceness makes
Error a fault and truth discourtesy....
Calmness is a great advantage: he that lets
Another chafe, may warm him at his fire.

GEORGE HERBERT

The Church-Porch


And while I at length debate and beat the bush,
There shall step in other men and catch the birds.

JOHN HEYWOOD

Proverbs


In argument
Similes are like songs in love:
They must describe; they nothing prove.

MATTHEW PRIOR

Alma


Argument is a gift of Nature.

CHARLES DICKENS

Barnaby Rudge


In all disputes, so much as there is of passion, so much there is of nothing to the purpose.

THOMAS BROWNE

Religio Medici


I have found you an argument; but I am not obliged to find you an understanding.

SAMUEL JOHNSON

Life of Samuel Johnson


The quiet shaft of ridicule oftimes does more than argument.

WILLIAM SCARBOROUGH

attributed, And I Quote


Let thy tongue tang with arguments of state.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Twelfth Night


If ifs and ands were pots and pans
There'd be no work for the tinkers.

ROBERT BLACKHOUSE PEACOCK

A glossary of the dialect of the hundred of Lonsdale


We may convince others by our arguments; but we can only persuade them by their own.

JOSEPH JOUBERT

Pensées


You may say, I am hot; I say I am not,
Only warm, as the subject on which I am got.

JONATHAN SWIFT

The Famous Speechmaker


All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments: no, it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much as the point of departure, as the element in which arguments have their life.

LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN

On Certainty


And but one word with one of us? Couple it with something; make it a word and a blow.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Romeo and Juliet


There is no good in arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat.

J.R. LOWELL

Democracy and Other Addresses


Testimony is like the shot of a long-bow, which owes its efficacy to the force of the shooter; argument is like the shot of the cross-bow, equally forcible whether discharged by a giant or a dwarf.

ROBERT BOYLE

attributed, A Treatise on Facts as Subjects of Inquiry by a Jury