quotations about arguments & arguing
We may convince others by our arguments; but we can only persuade them by their own.
JOSEPH JOUBERT
Pensées
Treating your adversary with respect is giving him an advantage to which he is not entitled.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
Life of Samuel Johnson
No sensible man ever engages, unprepared, in a fencing match of words with a woman.
WILKIE COLLINS
The Woman in White
If he take you in hand, sir, with an argument,
He'll bray you in a mortar.
BEN JONSON
The Alchemist
And but one word with one of us? Couple it with something; make it a word and a blow.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Romeo and Juliet
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
Whenever you argue with another wiser than yourself, in order that others may admire your wisdom, they will discover your ignorance.
SADI
Gulistan
When a man who is drinking neat gin starts talking about his mother he is past all argument.
C.S. FORESTER
The African Queen
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
In arguing, answer your opponent's earnest with jest and his jest with earnest.
ARISTOTLE
Rhetoric
Argument is a gift of Nature.
CHARLES DICKENS
Barnaby Rudge
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
You are fond of argument, and now you fancy that I am a bag full of arguments.
SOCRATES
Theaetetus
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
Just consider how terrible the day of your death will be
Others will go on speaking and you will not be able to argue back
RAM MOHAN ROY
attributed, Africa Quarterly, 2006
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
Brief and bitter the debate.
ROBERT BROWNING
Hervé Riel
You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into.
BEN GOLDACRE
Bad Science
This is no time nor fitting place to mar
The mirthful meeting with a wordy war.
LORD BYRON
Lara
There is hardly a better way to avoid discussion than by releasing an argument from the control of the present and by saying that only the future will reveal its merits.
HANNAH ARENDT
The Origins of Totalitarianism