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Argument Quotes


"John Foster Dulles had called on me in his capacity as Secretary of State, and he had exhausted every argument to persuade me to place Cambodia under the protection of the South East Asia Treaty Organization."


"Myself when young did eagerly frequent doctor and saint, and heard great argument about it and about: but evermore came out by the same door as in I went."


"George W. Bush bought the election - period. End of story. There is no argument. You can try to come up with any argument you can, but there is none."


"We are told that the possession of nuclear weapons - in some cases even the testing of these weapons - is essential for national security. But this argument can be made by other countries as well."


"That's what we're missing. We're missing argument. We're missing debate. We're missing colloquy. We're missing all sorts of things. Instead, we're accepting."


"I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left."


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


"The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it."


"If you are ignorant, you certainly can get into some interesting arguments."


"It is more noble by silence to avoid an injury than by argument to overcome it."


"What convinces is conviction. Believe in the argument you're advancing. If you don't you're as good as dead. The other person will sense that something isn't there, and no chain of reasoning, no matter how logical or elegant or brilliant, will win your case for you."


"Similes prove nothing, but yet greatly lighten and relieve the tedium of argument."


"Behind every argument is someone's ignorance."


"Argument is to me the air I breathe. Given any proposition, I cannot help believing the other side and defending it."


"To make the argument that the media has a left- or right-wing, or a liberal or a conservative bias, is like asking if the problem with Al-Qaeda is do they use too much oil in their hummus."


"The long term versus the short term argument is one used by losers."


"He who establishes his argument by noise and command shows that his reason is weak."


"When blithe to argument I come, Though armed with facts, and merry, May Providence protect me from The fool as adversary, Whose mind to him a kingdom is Where reason lacks dominion, Who calls conviction prejudice And prejudice opinion."


"Lutherans, whose arguments and mistakes will not be difficult to contest or discover, do not want to attribute any value to works, and they do not understand enough the scope of the justification."


"I do not have a brain that I long for in dealing with matters of which I am ignorant, that don't come within my ken and a rationale, a reason, and argument and so on, and I can't do that and I'm not in that bracket at all."


"The difficult part in an argument is not to defend one's opinion but rather to know it."


"Every argument on lynching in the South gets back sooner or later to the question of rape."


"The most important thing in an argument, next to being right, is to leave an escape hatch for your opponent, so that he can gracefully swing over to your side without too much apparent loss of face."


"Admitting, however, for the sake of argument, that I am prime and sole minister in this country, am I, therefore, prime and sole minister of all Europe? Am I answerable for the conduct of other countries as well as for that of my own?"


"I remember having an argument with Alan, I said the Queen's not just going to call the guy up and send him out to do it. And Alan says, well, how would a monarch give orders to her assassin."


"For if any man who never saw fire proved by satisfactory arguments that fire burns. His hearer's mind would never be satisfied, nor would he avoid the fire until he put his hand in it that he might learn by experiment what argument taught."



"You can make an argument that Bill O'Reilly is a conservative or a Republican. Bill's kind of unpredictable. Somebody might say that he would have been comfortable in the Democratic Party of Scoop Jackson."


"Silence is argument carried out by other means."


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


"We must reinforce argument with results."
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