quotations about arguments & arguing
I've heard old sunning stagers
Say, fools for arguments use wagers.
SAMUEL BUTLER
Hudibras
In argument
Similes are like songs in love:
They must describe; they nothing prove.
MATTHEW PRIOR
Alma
Slow to argue, but quick to act.
BRET HARTE
John Burns of Gettysburg
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
Much virtue in If.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
As You Like It
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
Argument is a gift of Nature.
CHARLES DICKENS
Barnaby Rudge
No sensible man ever engages, unprepared, in a fencing match of words with a woman.
WILKIE COLLINS
The Woman in White
It does take great maturity to understand that the opinion we are arguing for is merely the hypothesis we favor, necessarily imperfect, probably transitory, which only very limited minds can declare to be a certainty or a truth.
MILAN KUNDERA
Encounter
There are two sides to every question.
PROTAGORAS
Protagoras
To make the weaker argument the stronger.
PLATO
Apology of Socrates
So high at last the contest rose,
From words they almost came to blows.
JAMES MERRICK
The Chameleon
We may convince others by our arguments; but we can only persuade them by their own.
JOSEPH JOUBERT
Pensées
The tree of knowledge blasted by dispute,
Produces saples leaves instead of fruit.
JOHN DENHAM
Progress of Learning
Whenever you argue with another wiser than yourself, in order that others may admire your wisdom, they will discover your ignorance.
SADI
Gulistan
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
We arg'ed the thing at breakfast, we arg'ed the thing at tea,
And the more we arg'ed the question, the more we didn't agree.
WILL CARLETON
Betsy and I Are Out
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
Brief and bitter the debate.
ROBERT BROWNING
Hervé Riel
The kind of truth that can be asserted by argument had lost all glamour, all lustre, for him, seeming no more now than another aspect of that ancient urge -- much older than the desire for truth -- to command attention.
BARRY UNSWORTH
Sacred Hunger