quotations about arguments & arguing
His conduct still right, with his argument wrong.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
Retaliation
To strive with an equal is a doubtful thing to do; with a superior, a mad thing; with an inferior, a vulgar thing.
SENECA
De Ira
The best way of answering a bad argument is not to stop it, but to let it go on in its course till it leaps over the boundaries of common sense.
SYDNEY SMITH
"Spring Guns and Man Traps"
Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.
JOHN MILTON
Areopagitica
And friendly free discussion, calling forth
From the fair jewel, Truth, its latent ray.
JAMES THOMSON
Liberty
And while I at length debate and beat the bush,
There shall step in other men and catch the birds.
JOHN HEYWOOD
Proverbs
No sensible man ever engages, unprepared, in a fencing match of words with a woman.
WILKIE COLLINS
The Woman in White
The most important tactic 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 an embarrassing loss of face.
STEPHEN JAY GOULD
attributed, goodreads
I have found you an argument; but I am not obliged to find you an understanding.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
Life of Samuel Johnson
You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.
JOHN MORLEY
On Compromise
If he take you in hand, sir, with an argument,
He'll bray you in a mortar.
BEN JONSON
The Alchemist
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
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
Treating your adversary with respect is giving him an advantage to which he is not entitled.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
Life of Samuel Johnson
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
A noisy man is always in the right.
WILLIAM COWPER
Conversations
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
You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into.
BEN GOLDACRE
Bad Science
We should not investigate facts by the light of arguments, but arguments by the light of facts.
MYSON
attributed, Lives of Eminent Philosophers