top of page
Argument Quotes


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


"Don't take the wrong side of an argument just because your opponent has taken the right side."


"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."


"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."


"It's the duty of a lawyer to represent anyone for whom a responsible argument could be made."


"Arguments are to be avoided: they are always vulgar and often convincing."


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


"In the discovery of secret things and in the investigation of hidden causes, stronger reasons are obtained from sure experiments and demonstrated arguments than from probable conjectures and the opinions of philosophical speculators of the common sort."


"When you let someone else win an argument, often you both end up winners."


"I don't accept at all the quite popular argument that the press is responsible for the monarchy's recent troubles. The monarchy's responsible for the monarchy's recent troubles. To blame the press is the old thing of blaming the messenger for the message."


"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."


"Given the difficulty of resisting such temptations over the longer run, a proper concern for the welfare of congressional souls may well be the ultimate argument in favor of term limitations."


"I don't feel that an atmosphere of debate and total disagreement and argument is such a bad thing. It makes for a vital and alive field."


"Silence is argument carried out by other means."


"Be able to analyze statistics, which can be used to support or undercut almost any argument."


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


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


"A flourishing, morally credible media is a vital component in the maintenance of genuinely public talk, argument about common good."


"Capital punishment is the source of many an argument, both good and bad."


"Most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do."


"The best way I know of to win an argument is to start by being in the right."


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


"Observe which side resorts to the most vociferous name-calling and you are likely to have identified the side with the weaker argument and they know it."


"The best argument for mutual funds is that they offer safety and diversification. But they don't necessarily offer safety and diversification."


"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."


"Could I interrupt here, because there is an alternative explanation, which you are particularly well placed to examine. You know the argument that it is the alchemists in the laboratories who invent the sweet new kits."


"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."


"If you feel yourself to be above the mass, speak so as to raise the mass to the height of your argument."



"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."


"A day without an argument is like an egg without salt."


"If he who employs coercion against me could mould me to his purposes by argument, no doubt he would. He pretends to punish me because his argument is strong; but he really punishes me because his argument is weak."


"At the conclusion of my argument I received very high compliments from the Chief Justice and later from other of the Judges. What they said I do not care to repeat."


"It is true that Mr. Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, after which there was a commitment to give 40 acres and a mule. That's where the argument, to this day, of reparations starts. We never got the 40 acres. We went all the way to Herbert Hoover, and we never got the 40 acres. We didn't get the mule. So we decided we'd ride this donkey as far as it would take us."


"One could drive a prairie schooner through any part of his argument and never scrape against a fact."


"You never need an argument against the use of violence, you need an argument for it."
bottom of page
