We have collected the best Argument Quotes by famous authors including Lisa Blatt, Mark Walport, William Godwin, Janet Frame, James Russell Lowell and many others, we hope that among them you will find the right thought.
My nine-year-old was trying to read my spiel. When she tried to pronounce the word ‘pharmaceutical,’ it was frightening. She would love to argue in the Supreme Court one day. My son asked me, ‘Mommy, why do you have to have so many arguments? Why can’t you have agreements?’
Lisa Blatt
People have extreme beliefs about whether it is right for humans to tamper with embryos in any way at all. Sometimes the values discussion gets conflated with the science discussion. We shouldn’t pretend we’re having an argument about science when we’re having an argument about values.
Mark Walport
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.
William Godwin
For your own good is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction.
Janet Frame
There is no good in arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat.
James Russell Lowell
In Vegas, I got into a long argument with the man at the roulette wheel over what I considered to be an odd number.
Steven Wright
‘War and Peace’ holds a strange place in literary history, participating in the crowning of realism as a substantial and serious literary mode in America, even as the novel also contributed to the argument that historical fiction could be by nature dangerous, illegitimate, and inaccurate.
Alexander Chee
If you feel yourself to be above the mass, speak so as to raise the mass to the height of your argument.
George Henry Lewes
One of the essential and most valid objections against the act of faith is that it is irrational, inasmuch as it offends against the syllogistic rule that the conclusion of an argument shall contain nothing more than the premises.
Vincent McNabb
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.
Norodom Sihanouk
The long term versus the short term argument is one used by losers.
John Dalberg-Acton
The argument that all Jews have a heartfelt investment in the state of Israel is untrue. Some have a heartfelt investment in corned beef sandwiches.
Judith Butler
Discussion is an exchange of knowledge; an argument an exchange of ignorance.
Robert Quillen
A strong argument for the religion of Christ is this – that offences against Charity are about the only ones which men on their death-beds can be made – not to understand – but to feel – as crime.
Edgar Allan Poe
There is something about guns that inhibits understanding. It is not just that they can put an end to argument. They somehow generate beliefs that are obviously contrary to observable fact.
Edmund Morgan
You can get a certain amount of pleasure as a mathematical spectator, reading and watching some of the most beautiful arguments that have been created in the history of humanity. But that’s too passive.
Steven Strogatz
A successful argument for a government manufacturing policy has to go beyond the feeling that it’s better to produce ‘real things’ than services. American consumers value health care and haircuts as much as washing machines and hair dryers.
Christina Romer
Well, we can’t say any more than we can say there is no god, there is no afterlife. We can only say there is no persuasive evidence for or argument for it.
Christopher Hitchens
When you call somebody a Nazi, you can make the argument that you’re inciting violence and here’s how: As a country, we all agree that Nazis are bad. We actually invaded an entire continent to defeat the Nazis.
Dan Crenshaw
Silence is argument carried out by other means.
Che Guevara
A true intellectual is a man who, after reading a book and being convinced by its arguments, will shoot someone or, more likely, order someone shot.
John McCarthy
All political debates, from tax policy to abortion, draw on moral arguments that rest on religious premises.
Michael J. Knowles
The response of anybody interested in liberty is that we all have a say and the ability to have an argument is exactly what liberty is, even though it may never be resolved. In any authoritarian society the possessor of power dictates, and if you try and step outside he will come after you.
Salman Rushdie
If and when they have a disagreement or argument, and if they can’t resolve it, happy couples default to trusting and forgiving rather than distrusting and begrudging.
Mark Goulston
The capacity to make free choices is not something we either have entirely or not at all. Rather, choices become freer the more they are the result of our own capacity to reflect on and assess facts and arguments.
Julian Baggini
Upsi is definitely the more romantic of the two. I am more laid back. We do have our differences of opinion sometimes. Upsi is always the first one to break the ice after an argument or a difference of opinion. That’s what I love most about her.
Ram Charan
I have an amazing relationship with my wife, but sometimes there are arguments. It happens.
Kris Allen
If you have high IQ, you’re really good at finding post-hoc arguments to support your feelings of truthiness.
Jonathan Haidt
Theses officers were good friends, so it must have been a terrible argument, because the one who played chess with my father was so angry that he walked over to the dentist’s house and got the dentist out of bed and shot him.
Bruno Schulz
We’ve stayed with the business and even though we have the arguments and disagreements that eight guys in a building trying to do a job would have, we try to keep that off the cameras because it’s too much drama. Really what it is is we have eight guys who are having fun doing what they do.
Richard Rawlings
I do think culture is an argument, and that was part of the way I was brought up. People at a social occasion in Ireland will start shouting and arguing. When the Yeats family lived in Bedford Park, they had to go round to the neighbours to say, ‘You might think we are fighting, but this is the way we talk to each other.’
Tom Paulin
There are a lot of good arguments for birth control, but as far as terminating a life that has already come into existence, I haven’t found any.
Kathy Ireland
Most umpires are good about letting the argument go, but you can only go on for so long, or go so far. If you don’t leave it alone after a minute or two, you’re in trouble. They want to keep the game moving, so they’ve got to throw you out. I had trouble leaving it alone, I guess.
Bobby Cox
Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor. Which is one very strong argument in favor of matrimony.
Jane Austen
What I look for in any book is an argument, based on evidence, that changes the way I think about something important.
Barry Schwartz
Their argument, and I think it’s a correct one, is that they’ll make more money from the trades and the hardcovers if nobody messes with the creative team.
Mark Millar
I had been very impressed with the courts we visited to see my father. The judges wearing wigs, the lawyers, the legal arguments – it was all exciting stuff for a kid.
Asma Jahangir
I believe in what I believe, and I think after all these years I’ve heard a lot of arguments, and I’m convinced by the superiority of the arguments that are made on the conservative side. I think that’s a better way to run a society.
Charles Krauthammer
That God cannot lie, is no advantage to your argument, because it is no proof that priests can not, or that the Bible does not.
Thomas Paine
‘The Creation’ presents an argument for saving biological diversity on Earth. Most of the book is for as broad an audience as possible.
E. O. Wilson
Because the speech is an argument, and a great speech makes an argument well, the act of making that argument is a really important part of how the policy process coalesces and solidifies both for the candidate and also the people serving that candidate.
Jon Lovett
As a writer, I have to go to a different place now. As a person… I want to step off whatever this stage is that I have been given. The argument has been made, the battle remains to be fought – and that requires a different set of skills.
Arundhati Roy
The argument can be made: Maybe you want to trust the government, but you shouldn’t because you don’t know where things are going to go in the future.
Jan Koum
I mean, you go to the internet and you can see all these conversations and arguments that our fans have about our music and that’s wonderful to know, that people would take the time to be that involved.
Alex Lifeson
We’re lawyers. We present the arguments, and the court sorts out the merits.
David Boies
Political debate with liberals is basically impossible in America today because liberals are calling names while conservatives are trying to make arguments.
Ann Coulter
At some point, someone will come up with an airtight argument as to why they should have a cloned child. At that point, cloning will be acceptable.
George M. Church
In a world where audiences listen for attitudes rather than arguments or information, speakers must feel the pressure to posture rather than engage.
Abhijit Banerjee
Anger is never without an argument, but seldom with a good one.
George Savile
I tell my boys not to play rough with their younger sister. I try to teach them what I know already: You’re never going to win an argument with a girl, so just let her have what she wants!
Steve Harvey
Convincing yourself doesn’t win an argument.
Robert Half
I say, If everybody in this house lives where it’s God first, friends and family second and you third, we won’t ever have an argument.
Jeff Foxworthy
Any fact is better established by two or three good testimonies than by a thousand arguments.
Marie Dressler
I’ve had some pretty good arguments with people, but I’ve never regretted it. I’ve had people come up where it’s all emotion and no fact. That’s always sad.
Patton Oswalt
One argument goes that recessions are good for female artists because when money flies out the window, women are allowed in the house. The other claims that when money ebbs, so do prospects for women.
Jerry Saltz
In the studio, there’s no tiptoeing. As opposed to big, blow-out arguments, there are just lots of little solutions.
Oliver Sim
Never argue at the dinner table, for the one who is not hungry always gets the best of the argument.
Richard Whately
On balance, after weighing the arguments, I believe that the time has come for Australia to create a new sovereign wealth fund.
Malcolm Turnbull
Science is based on the possibility of objectivity, on the possibility of different people checking out for themselves the observations made by others. Without that possibility, there is no empirical principle capable of deciding between different arguments and theories.
Jose Padilha
Who hasn’t had an argument with their mother-in-law?
Dervla Kirwan
I don’t accept the argument of people like David Horowitz that the government should impose some sort of predetermined political balance on academic research.
Juan Cole
You can do the best research and be making the strongest intellectual argument, but if readers don’t get past the third paragraph you’ve wasted your energy and valuable ink.
Carl Hiaasen
A lot of people pulled me up after ‘Trainspotting’ for its absence of politics, but the argument I make is that the absence of politics is political as well.
Irvine Welsh
My fights and arguments, even with God, went down on paper.
Curtis Mayfield
Many of us were raised without a father, and the subject of deadbeat dads hits home in a lot of areas. Most of all, doing a song about being a father to your daughter flies straight in the face of the argument that says hip-hop is misogynistic.
KRS-One
You can be happy, or you can be right. If you want to be part of a couple and win every argument, you’re in trouble.
Steve Harvey
Obama and the Democrats’ preposterous argument is that we are just one more big tax increase away from solving our economic problems. The inescapable conclusion, however, is that the primary driver of the short-term deficit is not tax cuts but the lack of any meaningful economic growth over the last half decade.
Bob Beauprez
It was an argument of rare power and eloquence.
William Henry Moody
Freddie was very much able to ride the neutral wave. We all respected his views because he was such a great songwriter. It was his idea that we share all the credits. It was decided all the songs would be attributed equally to Queen. That immediately got rid of the arguments. That was a fantastic, democratic notion.
Roger Taylor
This argument that somehow I’m chasing the limelight is a bunch of nonsense, and it’s offensive – highly offensive – to me.
Michael Avenatti
I actually bought the argument that if we democratized Iraq, we could create a space for venting some of the stuff that’s going on in the Middle East in these autocratic regimes that is expressing itself through jihadism, because it has nowhere else to express itself.
Andrew Sullivan
With reasonable men, I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter, nor waste arguments where they will certainly be lost.
William Lloyd Garrison
My argument would be that I don’t think there is much that’s genuinely political art that is good art.
Thom Yorke
We must reinforce argument with results.
Booker T. Washington
Arguments about Scripture achieve nothing but a stomachache and a headache.
Tertullian
Free speech gives us the ability to react vigorously with effective arguments and expose the weakness and misdirection of the other side’s claims.
Rush Limbaugh
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.
Omar Khayyam
I often have an argument with people. I say name me a classic song that’s not sad in some kind of way. And even if you can, you’ll have to search pretty far.
Danger Mouse
People romanticize struggle and obscurity, and I get that, but it’s a very one-dimensional argument to say that people who have money are evil, and artists who are poor are virtuous.
Shepard Fairey
The mark, to me, of a constructive argument is one that looks at a specific problem and says, ‘What shall we do about this?’ And a nonconstructive one is one that tries to label people.
Gloria Steinem
Each time I make a movie, it’s a little bit like taking another course in something because there’s an argument between these people that I don’t necessarily have an answer to.
Sydney Pollack
Give a talk to children and tell them dinosaurs didn’t drag their tails, and you get arguments.
Jack Horner
Yes, I have a philosophy, and you have to come with good arguments to change that philosophy, but, if someone has a better argument than me, then I will change.
Louis van Gaal
Yes, 85 percent of the art you see isn’t any good. But everyone has a different opinion about which 85 percent is bad. That in turn creates fantastically unstable interplay and argument.
Jerry Saltz
No references to the need to fight terror can be an argument for restricting human rights.
Vladimir Putin
There’s nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view that I hold dear.
Rose Kennedy
When there is tension, arguments and money problems, it’s tough to do your work. Some people thrive on that. I don’t.
Richard Jenkins
Gray space is fertile ground for fiction. When I can see both sides of an argument and feel strongly in both directions, then there’s a story there, then I can write real characters that I care about and believe in and champion on both sides.
Kelly Sue DeConnick
‘Study’ was the cry that reverberated in the corridors of my mind. Study to enable yourself to face the arguments advanced by opposition. Study to arm yourself with arguments in favor of your cult. I began to study.
Bhagat Singh
In one sense I feel that my book is a one-woman argument against determinism.
Susan Griffin
I was told in many places of Osgar’s bravery and Goll’s strength and Conan’s bitter tongue, and the arguments of Oisin and Patrick. And I have often been given the story of Oisin’s journey to Tir-nan-Og, the Country of the Young, that is, as I am told, a fine place and everything that is good is in it.
Lady Gregory
Sometimes a song becomes rhetoric, but you have to really empathise. You also have to leave room for both sides of the argument: even if you’re not telling the other side, you have to put that part in parentheses and make sure it’s understood.
Jason Isbell
Living with the liberals, you get to hear their arguments, fight with them all the time. Keeps me alert.
John Stossel
The sounder your argument, the more satisfaction you get out of it.
E. W. Howe
What we’ve been hearing over and over again is that the reason Republicans are opposed to the surtax is because of the concern of its impact on job creation. Well, if you carve out employers, you take away that argument.
Susan Collins
Yes, Democrats can prove that America pays more for health care than other countries; yes, they have won the dispute that private health insurance is needlessly expensive. But what they’ve lost is the argument that we are a society.
Thomas Frank
I guess when I think about it, one of the things I like to dramatise, and what is sometimes funny, is someone coming unglued. I don’t consider myself someone who is making the argument that I support these choices. I just think it can be funny.
Wes Anderson
My last conversation with my father was an argument we’d had. When I came to know of his hospitalisation, I’d lost him within seven hours. I still regret the last conversation with him.
Mouni Roy
The first and continuing argument for the curtailment of working hours and the raising of the minimum age was that education was necessary in a democracy and working children could not attend school.
Grace Abbott
Politicians are expected to spend half their time talking to funders and to keep them happy. Given this context, it’s not hard to see how a bribery charge can feel like a technical argument instead of a moral one.
Zephyr Teachout
I believe that President Clinton considered the legal merits of the arguments for the pardon as he understood them, and he rendered his judgment, wise or unwise, on the merits.
John Podesta
I want to write about serious things, but I want to write about them in a way that makes them accessible to a large number of people – to take them through the argument by dramatizing the circumstances in which these issues are being discussed.
Sebastian Faulks
If one of the arguments against eating meat is to do with cruelty and animal intelligence, then lab meat avoids that. There’s also the environmental argument for it.
Margaret Atwood
We are not won by arguments that we can analyze, but by tone and temper; by the manner, which is the man himself.
Louis D. Brandeis
CCTV is seen either as a symbol of Orwellian dystopia or a technology that will lead to crime-free streets and civil behaviour. While arguments continue, there is very little solid data in the public domain about the costs, quantity and effectiveness of surveillance.
Heather Brooke
I have no truck with the faintly conspiratorial argument that international governments are gleeful about a public-health emergency to enact authoritarian measures.
Claire Fox
Most of my arguments with musicians through the years have had more to do with their attitude about music, or their attitude about their own lives, or their personal responsibility. Music has never really been the big centerpiece of the fight.
Billy Corgan
Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.
Thomas Hardy
A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
Salman Rushdie
Censors can make a case for zero tolerance in language. They can make the argument that since we don’t allow our children to use that language in schools, we also shouldn’t give them stories in which it is used.
Chris Crutcher
Sound principles and eternal truths need to be frequently repeated so that we do not forget their application nor become dissuaded by other arguments.
Ezra Taft Benson
What I like about music is that you make a song, you’ve got your ideas in it, and people make that song part of their life – they hang out with their friends to it, they get in arguments to it, they get married to it, they get divorced to it. It’s in their world, and it takes on its own life.
Boots Riley
Be able to analyze statistics, which can be used to support or undercut almost any argument.
Marilyn vos Savant
Logical reasoning is an argument which we have with ourselves and which reproduces internally the features of a real argument.
Jean Piaget
When I addressed international forums as prime minister, the Israeli people expected me to present bold political initiatives that would bring peace – not arguments outlining why achieving peace now is not possible.
Ehud Olmert
The choices politicians make must be based on values – not an arbitrary, axe-wielding approach to public spending or a dismal exchange between Gordon Brown and David Cameron about percentages that sounds like an argument between different book-keepers.
Nick Clegg
The argument has been made in Congress that it is slippery slope if you allow therapeutic, what people people are calling therapeutic cloning, then you will get reproductive cloning.
David Baltimore
If you desire to be pure, have firm faith, and slowly go on with your devotional practices without wasting your energy in useless scriptural discussions and arguments. Your little brain will otherwise be muddled.
Ramakrishna
Don’t treat your heart like an action figure wrapped in plastic and never used. And don’t try to give me that nerd argument that your heart is a ‘Batman’ with a limited-edition silver bat-erang and therefore if it stays in its original packing it increases in value.
Amy Poehler
Dependency arguments often come from elites – either aid agencies or governments – and say something about attitudes to poor people.
Paul Harvey
I have no arguments to defend how brutal and disturbing a ritual the corrida is. Like all tragedies, no matter the beauty created, there are no happy endings. If it is indeed an art form, bullfighting is the most disturbing I have ever witnessed.
Brin-Jonathan Butler
Our judiciary has a reputation for intellectual rigour, careful consideration of the arguments, and a serious-minded determination to each decision based on what is right and not necessarily what is superficially popular. I am not sure that all politicians have the same reputation.
David Gauke
We should pass the U.N.’s Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism. At least it will clearly establish whom you view as a terrorist and whom you don’t. We need to delink terrorism from religion – to isolate terrorists who use this interchange of arguments between terrorism and religion.
Narendra Modi
What type of ‘person’ is the for-profit corporation? A spoiled brat – all rights and no responsibilities, a traditional conservative argument would say.
Timothy Noah
Don’t forget your great guns, which are the most respectable arguments of the rights of kings.
Frederick the Great
If I can make a career for myself after Potter, and it goes well, and is varied and with longevity, then that puts to bed the ‘child actors argument’.
Daniel Radcliffe
Capital punishment is the source of many an argument, both good and bad.
Marilyn vos Savant
I love argument, I love debate. I don’t expect anyone just to sit there and agree with me, that’s not their job.
Margaret Thatcher
The media when it focuses on climate change at all, does so in terms of carbon emissions and how to reduce them. Only rarely do our leaders advance arguments about adapting our environment and our economy to the effects of climate change that are already inevitable.
Barry Gardiner
Although everyone fights, few people know how to have a good argument, an argument that clears the air and makes it less likely a future argument will take place on the same subject.
David Viscott
I think instead writers and publishers and readers need to go to the places where people are, and make the argument that there is great value to the quiet, contemplative process of reading a novel, that reading great books carefully offers pleasures and consolations that no iPad app ever can.
John Green
Anyone can write an academic piece directed at other academics. To write something that delivers an argument and a gripping storyline to someone’s granny or eight-year-old takes the highest quality of your powers.
Simon Schama
There’s a compelling reason why I belong in the Hall of Fame, but I understand the argument against me. My career didn’t go like most, and I’m 100 percent fine with that because that’s what resonates with people.
Kurt Warner
Caving into blather and peer pressure never bolstered anyone’s argument.
Lisa Kennedy Montgomery
As someone who spent a lot of years living in Jerusalem, one of the great perks is that when you come back, and you get into these Israel arguments in your American-Jewish clan, you can really just silence them by saying, ‘I lived there.’ So we used it like a bludgeon.
Nathan Englander
Where all is but dream, reasoning and arguments are of no use, truth and knowledge nothing.
John Locke
No matter what argument you make against evolution, the response is, ‘Well, you know, it’s possible to believe in evolution and believe in God.’ Yes, and it’s possible to believe in Spiderman and believe in God, but that doesn’t prove Spiderman is true.
Ann Coulter
We are not won by arguments that we can analyse but by tone and temper, by the manner which is the man himself.
Samuel Butler
If in the script there is an argument about gun control, the most precious document you could produce at ‘The West Wing’ that week is a passionate, intelligent case against gun control. We know how to do the other one.
Lawrence O’Donnell
You can see it on the Internet: There’s an argument going on continually about, ‘What is folk music?’ And I don’t really want to get involved in that. It’s an endless argument, a ‘How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?’ kind of argument.
Roger McGuinn
In a team like Real Madrid, arguments always arise when things are not going well.
Toni Kroos
Restoring and maintaining a great nation’s fiscal health will require not just sound arguments and an engaged public but something more. It will require an electoral system that encourages our representatives to place the long-term interests of the public ahead of parochial special interests.
Alan K. Simpson
I cannot think of a tactical alliance with the Left because I represent the idea that there is a peaceful, nonviolent way to dislodge a dictatorship… A tactical Left alliance damages my argument. If I succeed with them, we will never know if peace can really produce freedom.
Corazon Aquino
The argument on the other side of special rights is completely bogus. It’s bogus because you could make exactly the same claim about racial or ethnic or religious minorities.
Tom Allen
One thing that I find very unmotivating is the kind of Plan B argument: when Earth gets destroyed, you want to be somewhere else. That doesn’t work for me. We have sent robotic probes now to every place in the solar system, and this is the best one.
Jeff Bezos
The idea of what’s acceptable and what’s shocking, that’s where I investigate. I mean, you can’t be on ‘Top Gear,’ where your only argument is that it’s all just a joke and anyone who takes offence is an example of political correctness gone mad, and then not accept the counterbalance to that.
Stewart Lee
My biggest ‘Spinal Tap’ moment was a stupid one as well. When we were rehearsing for the Zeppelin O2 gig, I was having an argument with my drum pedals. I actually took them outside, and drove over them several times with the car. Shouting at them and telling them they’ll never work again.
Jason Bonham
With George Bush’s policies, I could make an argument for how they affect black people in a negative way. You know what I mean? But I wouldn’t argue that he’s a white supremacist.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
I don’t buy the argument that there can’t be a successful independent candidacy for the presidency of the United States. People who say, ‘It can’t happen,’ are many of the same people who said we’d never elect an African American.
Mark McKinnon
An argument often given for why Earth couldn’t host another form of life is that once the life we know became established, it would have eliminated any competition through natural selection. But if another form of life were confined to its own niche, there would be little direct competition with regular life.
Paul Davies
They forbade me from flying, despite all my protests and arguments. After being once in space, I was desperately keen to go back there. But it didn’t happen.
Valentina Tereshkova
People’s minds are changed through observation and not through argument.
Will Rogers
I always feel like I want to write a song when I’m really upset. And when I’m in an argument with my family, I go straight to the piano and just kind of take it out on the piano and get all emotional.
Pixie Lott
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.
Studs Terkel
I dislike conflict, so I do try and steer clear of arguments. Apart from with my coach. Who I literally have an argument with every day.
Jessica Ennis-Hill
There is some argument about who actually invented text messaging, but I think it’s safe to say it was a man. Multiple studies have shown that the average man uses about half as many words per day as women, thus text messaging. It eliminates hellos and goodbyes and cuts right to the chase.
Ashton Kutcher
In any discussion of technology, you hear the same argument: You can’t turn the clock back and you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Maybe not. But there are steps we can take to limit the social harm caused by this industry, just like we do with others.
Steve Hilton
Faith is an excitement and an enthusiasm: it is a condition of intellectual magnificence to which we must cling as to a treasure, and not squander on our way through life in the small coin of empty words, or in exact and priggish argument.
George Sand
The strangest thing about the low quality of Internet argument is that effective argument isn’t really so difficult. Sure, not everyone can be Clarence Darrow, but anyone who wants to be at least competent at argument can do it.
Barry Eisler
They believed that Britain was in Ireland defending their own interests, therefore the Irish had the right to use violence to put them out. My argument was that that type of thinking was out of date.
John Hume
I’m sure you have arguments with your friends, but they don’t get printed up and magnified in the papers.
Dickey Betts
I’m so tired of this argument that all we ever do is under Kremlin orders and so and so forth. Tell me, how is it possible? I am not on the air. If you watch RT, you will see that all of our shows are hosted by people to whom it would be impossible to tell them anything.
Margarita Simonyan
When you have a white male making the arguments, they carry more weight… Should they carry more weight? Absolutely not. But do they? Yes.
Michael Avenatti
I was having an argument with my stepfather, and he was like, ‘Why don’t you join the Marine Corps?’ And I was like, ‘Noooo! Well, maybe, actually… ‘ I went and saw the recruiter, who was like, ‘Are you on the run from the cops? Because we’ve never had someone want to leave so fast.’
Adam Driver
What is faith? If you believe something because you have evidence for it, or rational argument, that is not faith. So faith seems to be believing something despite the absence of evidence or rational argument for it.
Peter Singer
My argument has always been that this is not an anti-Bush film, it’s a pro-democracy film. And if Bush comes out on the wrong side of democracy, that’s his problem.
John Sayles
In third grade, I had to an oral report on the state of Oregon. I brought up Big Foot sightings, and I remember there was an argument about whether or not Big Foot was valid history. Ever since then I’ve been thinking about how subjective history is.
Sufjan Stevens
It is not a dream that someday, nations will be able to settle their difficulties without war, just as individuals now settle their personal feuds without resorting to arguments of physical strength or sharp steel. For, then, humanity will have created international jurisdiction and a power to enforce its laws.
Ellen Key
Liberty is a great celestial Goddess, strong, beneficent, and austere, and she can never descend upon a nation by the shouting of crowds, nor by arguments of unbridled passion, nor by the hatred of class against class.
Annie Besant
I’m generally slow to anger, quick to forgive, and I take in information before making decisions. So no matter how controversial the decision, my general demeanour is to put on white lab coat and gloves and look at the evidence, weigh the arguments and see what makes sense.
Peter Blair Henry
I’ve never bought the argument that people are apathetic about politics.
Chuka Umunna
The scientific argument advanced for intelligent design at the Dover trial, those arguments collapsed, scientifically and intellectually.
Kenneth R. Miller
Unhappy, let alone angry, religious people provide more persuasive arguments for atheism and secularism than do all the arguments of atheists.
Dennis Prager
I don’t mind if the couple next to me is tense or the kids are whiny. I’d even be happy to hear an honest argument, evidence of thinking. I’d like to know these teeth-perfect families don’t just buy each other stuff but just occasionally can talk to one another.
Margaret Heffernan
Despite a campaign that was based on a very powerful promise of transparency, President Obama, and again in my view quite correctly, has used the state secrets argument in a variety of courts, as much as President Bush.
Michael Hayden
A lot more people are willing to invest in bonds denominated in euros. And there was the fiscal discipline argument, which is that this tied the hands of countries the market hasn’t always trusted, which also helped them borrow at low rates.
Austan Goolsbee
I grew up in a family that despised displays of strong emotion, rage in particular. We stewed. We sulked. When arguments did occur, they were full-scale conniptions, and we regarded them as family failings. Afterward, we withdrew from one another and tried our best to strike the event from our memories.
Koren Zailckas
Issues over same-sex marriage and LGBT people in the PCUSA are not new: there is a 40-plus year history of arguments and tacit agreements over the issue of sexuality in the denomination, and the first openly gay minister in the PCUSA was ordained in 2011.
Anthea Butler
Though I don’t have any serious argument with Neil Gaiman’s ‘American Gods’, I believe that Americans cease to be Europeans – the land makes them become Americans. You see it happening all the time when you travel around America.
Michael Moorcock
The argument about the need to regulate the digital space has to be weighed against freedom of expression in our society, whether we are interacting in a virtual world or in the real world where we have the growth of so-called ‘safe spaces.’
Claire Fox
Go beyond science, into the region of metaphysics. Real religion is beyond argument. It can only be lived both inwardly and outwardly.
Swami Sivananda
I’ve always thought the main argument for organic was more environmental than a health argument. I just don’t think spraying a lot of pesticides into the environment on a routine basis is a good thing.
John Mackey
What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?
George Orwell
I cannot do confrontation. You know that fight or flight thing? I’m flight. I just don’t want the argument.
Jennifer Saunders
You are free to reject God. Make sure that you’re really rejecting God, not some caricature of God that the church has shown you. But I, one, respect a God who not only allows us to reject Him but includes the arguments we can use against Him in the Bible. I respect that.
Philip Yancey
On the other hand, it is not fair to say that changes in federal policy have caused our tuition to rise faster. Every economic argument imaginable would indicate that we should raise tuition at a faster rate than we do.
Charles Vest
I don’t care that much about rote memorization. An old boyfriend of mine used to get into lacerating arguments with his parents over facts, and I used to watch on in mute astonishment. How could anyone actually argue about something that could be looked up?
Susan Orlean
There have been a lot of critiques of the finance industry’s having possibly foisted subprime mortgages on unknowing buyers, and a lot of those kinds of arguments are even more powerful when used against college administrators who are probably in some ways engaged in equally misleading advertising.
Peter Thiel
Life comes forth for no other reason than to be and make more life. It will fight and crawl and do anything in its power to live, and once alive, it will stand against all to remain alive. Its existence is its own argument.
Rick Tumlinson
The argument that won the Brexit campaign is the one that said take back control… which is another way of saying we want to control our destinies again. This is an existential issue for the whole of Europe, not just for the U.K., because this sentiment is not limited to the United Kingdom.
Frans Timmermans
When I stopped playing and became a coach, I realised that in the past, all the arguments that I had with my coaches were mainly focussed on the technical aspects, and probably that was the biggest signal that I had to have things done my way!
Massimiliano Allegri
A bit of a theory, more a corner of the eye noticing than an airtight argument: in the course of long artistic careers, women are more likely than men to change form and style, Proteus-like.
Stacey D’Erasmo
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.
Margaret Thatcher
Still, the film nearly didn’t happen a number of times. There were great arguments with United Artists about how to reduce the cost because they were nothing if not conscious of the price of the film.
John Schlesinger
Because of the success of ‘Hamilton’ and ‘On Your Feet!’ you can’t hide behind the old argument of, ‘It needs to be bankable, so we can’t put all these people of color in the show.’ We are bankable.
Lin-Manuel Miranda
You cannot ‘rationalize’ what is not rational to begin with – as if lying were called ‘truthization.’ There is no way to obtain more truth for a proposition by bribery, flattery, or the most passionate argument – you can make more people believe the proposition, but you cannot make it more true.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
While we remain a nation decisively shaped by religious faith, our politics and our culture are, in the main, less influenced by movements and arguments of an explicitly Christian character than they were even five years ago. I think this is a good thing – good for our political culture.
Jon Meacham
I do insist on making what I hope is sense so there’s always a coherent narrative or argument that the reader can follow.
Howard Nemerov
I don’t think anyone would describe me as an understated advocate. Several people have told me my argument style is very direct and very blunt, which I find mystifying. How could you ever be anything but direct and blunt?
Lisa Blatt
When every one of your arguments is characterized an attempt to bring back slavery or resegregate lunch counters, it’s a little hard to have any sort of productive debate.
Ann Coulter
Don’t try to convince your partner you are right. Instead of trying to win arguments, try to have a winning relationship!
Karen Salmansohn
There’s a popular saying that the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. Desire and innovation will trump policy, the argument goes, as clever programmers circumvent controls.
Virginia Postrel
In my experience, yelling at people that they are wrong and disgusting rarely wins the argument, nor changes point of view.
Jack Monroe
The argument that someone is a bad man is an inadequate argument for war and certainly an inadequate and unacceptable argument for regime change.
John Major
The divorce in my family was really amicable. There were no fireworks. It was all sort of behind the scenes, if you will. None of us kids ever saw any argument.
Adam Scott
I don’t write about certain arguments I have with my wife. I’d get my head torn off if wrote about certain things.
Harvey Pekar
We can never allow people who use nondemocratic means, people who use violence instead of arguments, people who use knives instead of debates, we can never allow them to set the agenda.
Geert Wilders
When you DJ, you’re just on your own, which is nice because there’s no argument.
Peter Hook
No one can persuade another to change. Each of us guards a gate of change that can only be opened from the inside. We cannot open the gate of another, either by argument or emotional appeal.
Marilyn Ferguson
I hate this argument that says little Britain or something outside, or Britain is part of a wider Europe. We can both be within our trading relationships within Europe but we can also be a fantastic global trader.
Iain Duncan Smith
Among the many arguments to be made against cultural revolutions is that they are monotonous in spirit and monomaniacal in intention.
Howard Jacobson
Before you decide to have an argument, think about what you really want to accomplish. Do you just want to let your feelings out, or is there a point you are trying to make? What is it?
David Viscott
No matter what side of the argument you are on, you always find people on your side that you wish were on the other.
Thomas Berger
There is no satisfaction to be derived from having had many of our arguments borne out by events.
Charles Kennedy
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.
Phyllis McGinley
The strong argument for Heaven as a place centers in and clusters about Jesus. The man Jesus, bearing a man’s form, the body He wore on earth, has a place assigned Him – a high place.
Edward McKendree Bounds
I now add, farther, that the apostle’s argument is so far from proving it to be the duty of people to obey, and submit to, such rulers as act in contradiction to the public good, and so to the design of their office, that it proves the direct contrary.
Jonathan Mayhew
One thing about liberals: It doesn’t even occur to them that there is another side to an argument. They are so convinced of the righteousness of their own position that it doesn’t dawn on them that a reasonable person might have a different viewpoint.
Monica Crowley
Evolution has long been the target of illogical arguments that use presumption.
Marilyn vos Savant
If you’re going to make the argument that Fox is conservative, you can’t make it very easily unless you diminish my role.
Alan Colmes
He who is vain and delights in his own ability is deceived by his inferiors. When he likes to bring forth arguments and kindliness, his inferiors take advantage of his abilities.
Han Fei
Constitutional arguments that seem as dry as dust can have momentous consequences.
George Will
There are jobs to be created on both sides of the climate argument. Whether we are investing in oil or sun, coal or wind, gas or algae, the economy will be stimulated by the investment. The economy, unlike each of us, is not swayed by ideology.
Evangeline Lilly
I’d be perfectly happy never to have to answer anything again about how I work with Ethan, or whether we have arguments, or… you know what I mean? I’ve been answering those questions for 20 years. I suppose it’s interesting to people.
Joel Coen
I always remember my mum and dad arguing a lot and one main reason was lack of money. I realized very young that I always wanted to make money so I’d never have the same arguments like my mum and dad.
Gino D’Acampo
If I just point out the fact that black people hurt each other, too, then we can ignore the fact that other people harm black people. I think it’s an irresponsible argument.
Trip Lee
I come from an Italian family. One of the greatest and most profound expressions we would ever use in conversations or arguments was a slamming door. The slamming door was our punctuation mark.
Mario Batali
Arguments are healthy. They clear the air.
John Deacon
The journalistic ‘I’ is an overreliable narrator, a functionary to whom crucial tasks of narration and argument and tone have been entrusted, an ad hoc creation, like the chorus of Greek tragedy. He is an emblematic figure, an embodiment of the idea of the dispassionate observer of life.
Janet Malcolm
In truth, there is no rational argument for guns in this society. This is no longer a frontier nation in which people hunt their own food. It is a crowded, overwhelmingly urban country in which letting people have access to guns is a continuing disaster.
Molly Ivins
No argument for abortion survives scientific, philosophical, or theological scrutiny.
Michael J. Knowles
There’s always that argument to make – that you’re in better company historically if people don’t understand what you’re doing.
Elliott Smith
I love to argue. I’ve always loved to argue. And I love to point out the weaknesses of the opposing arguments. It may well be that I’m something of a shin kicker. It may well be that I’m something of a contrarian.
Antonin Scalia
Adults get more confused by social worker jargon. Unlike children, they are also less likely to see two sides of an argument, and they no longer think they can make the world a better place. That can make them rather boring, I suppose.
Nina Bawden
In more than 20 years I’ve spent studying the issue, I have yet to hear a convincing argument that college football has anything do with what is presumably the primary purpose of higher education: academics.
H. G. Bissinger
There’s this existential argument that comes in, at some point, when you’re over-thinking the songwriting process. There’s no guarantee that the more time you spend or the more you concentrate on certain aspects that that’s going to produce a better result, especially in the arts.
Chris Cornell
I am attracted to arguments that have a certain plausible originality to them.
Dinesh D’Souza
Most religious people in America fully embrace science. So the argument that religion has some issue with science applies to a small fraction of those who declare that they are religious. They just happen to be a very vocal fraction, so you got the impression that there are more of them than there actually is.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
It’s become a running joke among the public, and liberals have lost all credibility when it comes to climate science because their arguments have become so ridiculous and so obviously disconnected from reality.
Sonny Perdue
The best argument for teaching poetry is to put a three-year-old or a four-year-old and read Dr. Seuss, or Robert Louis Stevenson, and to feel how the child and you are engaging in something that’s really basic to the animal, which is passing on in these rhythmic ways, something that came from somewhere.
Robert Pinsky
My kids have never seen me scream at anybody. They’ve never seen an argument. There’s never been even a cold silence. And those are things that I grew up with because my parents did end up divorcing.
Edie Falco
My father had a perfectly good drummer who he had an argument with. So one day, on a Tuesday, my father came in with a cheap pawn shop set of drums and said, ‘Put your foot here, and you kick there, and you play this, and this is the high hat.’ And Friday night, I was playing in a honky-tonk.
Rodney Crowell
There is no argument that I won’t take seriously.
Mary Beard
I tend to believe, when you’re in a relationship, if you don’t fight, it’s not a real relationship. You have to have arguments and tensions, otherwise I don’t believe it.
Richard LaGravenese
It would be awesome to be so impressive that we could sway people to our way of thinking just by declaiming our thoughts, but probably most of us lack such gravitas. Luckily, there’s something even better: evidence, logic, and argument.
Barry Eisler
I’ve learned to start from a really sound argument, boil down the essence of what you’re trying to say, then build your humor around that, rather than starting with, ‘This sounds funny,’ and going from there.
Hasan Minhaj
Religion is not going to come up with any new arguments.
Christopher Hitchens
Most arguments for instituting or raising a minimum wage are based on fairness and redistribution. Even if workers are getting a competitive wage, many of us are deeply disturbed that some hard-working families still have very little.
Christina Romer
There should be restriction on migration. Some people may criticize me for that. But the future generations will see the merit in my argument.
Raj Thackeray
What we perceive things to be when they come out of our mouth is not what the listener perceives it to be. They think it differently. They’re not your blood. They’re not your mind. You get in an argument.
Dick Dale
There are plenty of downsides in life for anyone, including me. Everyone has their own personal worries. Everyone has normal families, with normal arguments. But in football, things are going really well, and that’s what I want to maintain. That’s one thing I can keep on top of.
Joe Hart
I think any List of Best X creates arguments and people saying ‘You listed that rubbish?’ That’s what lists like this are for.
Scott Westerfeld
For me, the ethical arguments that resonate strongest are the ones that oppose the death penalty.
Reid Hoffman
The strongest argument against totalitarianism may be a recognition of a universal human nature; that all humans have innate desires for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The doctrine of the blank slate… is a totalitarian’s dream.
Steven Pinker
I mean the only thing that is hopefully good about us is after the arguments we can actually still face each other the next day or the day after and talk about something else and sort of get over it.
John Deacon
Now, I’m not onboard with the argument that jokes are destructive to humanity. There are bigger issues, and I do not necessarily subscribe to the belief that jokes perpetuate violence and racism. They lampoon those things most of the time. But I could be wrong about that. I’m not a sociologist or an expert.
Moshe Kasher
If you have an argument with someone and you sulk, sometimes you don’t want to speak to them. But it is important to keep your friends close to you and do the right things.
Jermain Defoe
Sometimes the only thing we women want is a dick and no arguments. What could make us happier?
Linda Fiorentino
The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I can make the argument that people who don’t have the biggest ranges but have very unique voices, even if they may be pitchy at times… with the right record that’s really unique and distinct, they can have big hits.
Kara DioGuardi
I know many sports fans that don’t enjoy soccer. The argument is that there’s no action, not enough of it.
Rabih Alameddine
All the arguments to prove man’s superiority cannot shatter this hard fact: in suffering the animals are our equals.
Peter Singer
There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The strongest arguments prove nothing so long as the conclusions are not verified by experience. Experimental science is the queen of sciences and the goal of all speculation.
Roger Bacon
I know straight away if there are roles I don’t want to do, and I have a lot of arguments with my agents about those.
Aneurin Barnard
I have heard my fill of hurtful words. I think it’s especially egregious when citizens like me, who point out abuses in their country, are referred to as ‘do-gooders.’ This is how a phrase that can be used to stop an argument dead becomes part of common usage.
Gunter Grass
Arguments that we will never stop all shootings by restricting access to such weapons fails to account for our strong and common desire at least to stop many of them – or any of them.
George Takei
One of the most compelling arguments for encouraging the education of girls, particularly in developing countries, is this: Education enables jobs, jobs are a source of economic growth, and economic growth is a key to development and stability.
Tae Yoo
The Senate floor is and always has been the great arena of our democracy. I spent eight years in my younger life as a boxer, and sometimes when I enter the chamber, I think, ‘This is the ring. The American people can see us here and listen to our arguments. This is where the fights matter.’
Jim Webb
All good communal storytelling comes from the sagas and arguments within the writers room.
Chris Claremont
I will listen to any argument put to me.
George Osborne
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.
Sydney J. Harris
I don’t necessarily want kids. A lot of our friends are having children and I don’t know if it’s for me. I haven’t come down hardcore on either side of the argument. I think when people come from a stable family having children becomes a celebration and I’m not sure it would be that way for me.
Jon Hamm
Arguments over grammar and style are often as fierce as those over IBM versus Mac, and as fruitless as Coke versus Pepsi and boxers versus briefs.
Jack Lynch
When a business group tells us there is nothing wrong with the environment, naturally they may have good arguments, but we are also sceptical, because we know that they have an interest in these things.
Bjorn Lomborg
The most enduring Top 10 ever written wasn’t written at all, but chiseled onto stone tablets and conveyed down Mount Sinai by Moses, who introduced to the world not just a set of Biblical precepts but also a new format for starting arguments: the list of 10 things.
Steve Rushin
What nobody wants to discuss is whether or not the black-and-white argument about trade – you’re either a free trader or you’re a protectionist – is the right one. It’s the old 19th century argument.
John Ralston Saul
Since the break-up of the 1990s, Russia has not had winter sports facilities. All the winter sport venues were effectively located in countries that are no longer part of the federation. There is a strong argument for saying Sochi’s legacy will be this country will have winter sports facilities it did not have before.
Sebastian Coe
Most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do.
James Harvey Robinson
Few progressives would take issue with the argument that, significant accomplishments notwithstanding, the Obama presidency has been a big disappointment.
Eric Alterman
Workers who come to the U.S. see their wages and their standard of living boosted sharply simply by crossing the border. That’s a good thing, and one of the best arguments for immigration reform, even if you’ll rarely hear a politician make it.
James Surowiecki
Audiences I speak to are often openly hostile, and I know my arguments might fall on deaf ears with 99% of the audience.
Douglas Murray
Above all, spend time in places where people disagree with you. Reach out. Show up and make your argument. People will appreciate it, even if they are not inclined to vote for you.
Steve Bullock
Nonfiction, to me, feels like an argument, whereas a novel is like a series of questions.
Sheila Heti
The methods of peace propaganda which aim at establishing peace doctrine by argument and by creating a feeling favorable to peace in general seem to fall short of reaching the springs of human action and of dealing with the causes of the conduct which they seek to modify.
Elihu Root
If you can’t answer a man’s arguments, all is not lost; you can still call him vile names.
Elbert Hubbard
What I do know from my life is the phenomenon of saying, ‘This is too small a thing to argue about’, but then nevertheless finding oneself in that argument.
Alain de Botton
You never need an argument against the use of violence, you need an argument for it.
Noam Chomsky
Jokes for jokes’ sake are kind of meaningless to me. I understand the value of them, but it doesn’t speak to me as much. You can lace your argument with jokes, but tell me why you’re presenting this argument. What does it mean?
Hasan Minhaj
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.
Eddie Campbell
There are legitimate, even powerful arguments, to be made against the Bush administration’s foreign policy. But those arguments are complicated, hard to explain, and, in the end, not all that sensational.
Tucker Carlson
I think everyone has experienced those boring arguments about whose turn it is to do the dishes.
Taika Waititi
I understand that Republicans-running-against-Obamacare-in-order-to-save-Medicare is a clever jujitsu. But how long will they play out that argument before they get back to the economy?
Jennifer Granholm
Everything serious in the world is well approached by humour. It’s a powerful and often quite subversive tool. I suppose there is an argument that could be made against me for being frivolous, but I do think a laugh is a very generous thing to give.
Beeban Kidron
There have always been arguments showing that free will is an illusion: some based on hard physics, others based on pure logic.
Ted Chiang
One of the most powerful lessons I learned is when you make an argument in a film, you have to make sure both characters are right.
Justin Simien
Most of the time, you can beat a woman in an argument.
Tucker Carlson
Safety’ is a bogus argument regularly used by university officials to keep conservative speakers off of campuses. This isn’t because conservatives are dangerous, but because the left often reverts to violence instead of words when presented with ideas it disagrees with.
Katie Pavlich
When it comes to jobs, investment, growth, security and our influence in the world we are clearly stronger in Europe. But we are also making a Labour argument about workers’ rights that really matter, to millions of working people and the trade unions that represent them.
Hilary Benn
There will soon come an armed contest between capital and labor. They will oppose each other, not with words and arguments, but with shot and shell, gun-powder and cannon. The better classes are tired of the insane howling of the lower strata and they mean to stop them.
William Tecumseh Sherman
Preaching to the choir actually arms the choir with arguments and elevates the choir’s discourse. There’s a reason the right does it and does it well and triumphs.
Dan Savage
I would be absolutely astounded if population growth and industrialisation and all the stuff we are pumping into the atmosphere hadn’t changed the climatic balance. Of course it has. There is no valid argument for denial.
David Attenborough
In the sports world it’s all about argument. It’s all about having a hot take. The other person has to have the polar opposite opinion, and you bash them together. To me it is an outlier to have a conversation be the basis of why you are listening.
Rich Eisen
The argument that John F. Kennedy was a closet peacenik, ready to give up on what the Vietnamese call the ‘American War’ upon re-election, received its most farcical treatment in Oliver Stone’s ‘JFK.’
Rick Perlstein
Television is much more difficult because at every moment the network can force you to change things based on their belief about what would make it popular. You’re in a constant debate with a gun at your head, and the gun is cancellation. So it’s hard to win the arguments.
Judd Apatow
The moral argument is that we give big business a huge tax break, and why do we do it? To get their jobs.
Sam Brownback
Neither irony or sarcasm is argument.
Samuel Butler
The world I want to live in is a world where everybody is a bit more uncertain about their arguments and is a bit more open to other people’s arguments. I think that we can engage ideas without ad hominem attacks.
Adam Davidson
The test is can you do something, rather than have a theoretical argument – can you make a difference?
Johann Lamont
One of the arguments here at OLPC is, if 100 million kids could have an Asus running Windows, is that better with two million kids running the XO? And the answer is yes. We want kids connected and the largest possible number is the goal.
Nicholas Negroponte
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.
Clifford Geertz
To read the report of a discussion in which arguments for and against are presented, in which a subject has been covered from different points of view, with new ideas advanced – this is far more instructive than to read a brief account of the resolution passed on the matter.
Fredrik Bajer
Our comedy is just falling over, funny faces, arguments, all the comedy basics, really.
Bob Mortimer
To be able to bear provocation is an argument of great reason, and to forgive it of a great mind.
John Tillotson
My main argument against staying in the E.U. has been the poor economic record of the E.U. as a whole and the eurozone in particular. The performance has got worse the more the E.U. has developed joint policies and central controls.
John Redwood
Honestly, I want to live a calm life without being in the press. I want to be like any other American citizen who gets a speeding ticket or has an argument with his spouse… and doesn’t have the whole world know.
George Zimmerman
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.
Lyndon B. Johnson
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.
James L. Buckley
When I’m alone, I can sleep crossways in bed without an argument.
Zsa Zsa Gabor
I think fiction isn’t so good at being for or against things in general – the rhetorical argument a short story can make is only actualized by the accretion of particular details, and the specificity of these details renders whatever conclusions the story reaches invalid for wider application.
George Saunders
Facebook has become the richest and most powerful publisher in history by replacing editors with algorithms – shattering the public square into millions of personalised news feeds, shifting entire societies away from the open terrain of genuine debate and argument while they make billions from our valued attention.
Katharine Viner
Vera Caspary wrote an essay called ‘My ‘Laura’ and Otto’s’ where she talks about the arguments she had with Preminger. She felt that not only did he misunderstand the character but that he couldn’t help but be misogynist.
Sarah Weinman
Notwithstanding these major arguments the wave theory initially did not meet with complete acceptance.
Max von Laue
Reducing everything immediately to good and evil is bad history – not only because it isn’t true, but because reductionism is unpersuasive; it is boring. Good history, on the other hand, demands that one talk socratically – that one can present alternate viewpoints, not strawman arguments.
Ben Sasse
When you have an intense game, you’re going to have arguments. I have no problem with it. I think it’s healthy.
Scott Brooks
I rush to add that I find the Web infinitely useful for rustling up information, settling arguments or locating the legends of rock stars.
Adam Gopnik
But black people fall for that same argument, and they go around talking about law breakers. We did not make the laws in this country. We are neither morally nor legally confined to those laws. Those laws that keep them up, keep us down.
H. Rap Brown
It’s finding those nonsensical pieces of conversation that we all do all the time. We do all the time. When we’re talking on the telephone, there are arguments with people who agree when they both think that they disagree.
Barry Levinson
No one questions the right of individuals to go to the Central Lobby to explain their views to their own Member of Parliament. It is important for those in power to hear arguments in favour of policies from all sides and ought to lead to better decision-making.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I have no influence with the rising generation. All my arguments have failed to induce them to set bounds to their wants.
Benjamin Banneker
The secular argument, or the liberal argument, is to as much as possible remove taboos so things do not become unmentionable; to let some air into the discussion.
Christopher Hitchens
So if you’re on tour for eight months, a year… or whatever it is you definitely don’t want arguments and I’m happy to say that I’ve always had a really nice bunch of people around me all the time.
Joan Armatrading
It is more noble by silence to avoid an injury than by argument to overcome it.
Francis Beaumont
I believe that the pursuit of truth and right ideas through honest debate and rigorous argument is a noble undertaking.
Charles Krauthammer
The argument that any income redistribution is tantamount to socialism, and that socialism has always been unAmerican, has helped legitimise keeping taxes on America’s very wealthy very low.
Linda Colley
I have a save file in ‘Final Fantasy XII’ that is 125 hours long. I have gotten into legitimate arguments over the rules governing the tapping of mana in ‘Magic: The Gathering.’ I don’t like hugs or parties, high school sucked for me, and Nathan Fillion deemed something I wrote his ‘Favorite ‘Firefly’ fanboy rant to date.’
Kyle Hill
There’s so much stuff flying around online, and it’s so easy to get into arguments with people.
Charlie Brooker
We presumably believe that most of the technological progress over the arc of humanity to date has been good. I don’t see any argument to go back to 1600.
Patrick Collison
I like the concept of escalating warfare, but you need someone to fight back in order for things to escalate. If there’s no confrontation or argument going on, it’s too dull for me. I think that’s the nature of the prankster: Things are too quiet. What can I do?
Joshua Malina
What has struck me about the political world, as opposed to the business world, is that rational discourse has become all but impossible. All too often, arguments are conducted not on the basis of facts but on the basis of emotion – and, honestly, it is no fun being abused in the pages of tabloid newspapers or online.
Gina Miller
Frank was the BOSS and was not open to anything that was not from his head. There were no arguments about music because if you did, he would show you where the door was. Period.
Jimmy Carl Black
I used to have lot of arguments with my mother due to a lot of bruises on my body for trying my hand at wrestling. I used to say, ‘I am Rock,’ and I would get slapped.
Varun Dhawan
The Left masks its distaste for the Bible’s condemnation of homosexuality in a straw man argument that Bible believers are violent bigots. They are not. Citing the Bible doesn’t make you a bigot against human beings – it makes you a bigot against sin, which is a good thing.
Ben Shapiro
We have to be vigilant against protectionism and be constantly making the argument for free trade.
Andrew Scheer
At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed.
Frederick Douglass
Tolerance, openness to argument, openness to self-doubt, willingness to see other people’s points of view – these are very liberal and enlightened values that people are right to hold, but we can’t allow them to delude us to the point where we can’t recognise people who are needlessly perpetrating human misery.
Sam Harris
The more a race is governed by its passions, the less it has acquired the habit of cautious and reasoned argument, the more intense will be its love of music.
Stendhal
When I started as a White House correspondent, there was a lot of criticism from guys saying, ‘She focuses too much on the person but not enough on policy.’ I never understood that argument at all. I just didn’t agree with the premise.
Maureen Dowd
The best way to win an argument is to begin by being right.
William Ruckelshaus
Liberals are sometimes defined as people who can’t take their own side in an argument.
Cass Sunstein
In my view, the future of politics is, without a doubt, social liberalism married to economic conservatism. Which means we have to make an economic argument to social liberals, that it’s OK to vote for us. But we won’t run the economy into the ground at the same time.
Louise Mensch
I started out doing multiple characters from day one, when I got my fist job in ‘Dumbo’s Circus.’ I’m used to getting in an argument with myself, throwing myself off a cliff, patching myself up and brushing myself off with an arm around my shoulder.
Jim Cummings
My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.
Thomas Hardy
Thirty years ago, many economists argued that inflation was a kind of minor inconvenience and that the cost of reducing inflation was too high a price to pay. No one would make those arguments today.
Martin Feldstein
The other night I ate at a real nice family restaurant. Every table had an argument going.
George Carlin
Social systems have values – arguments baked into their design. For example, Twitter’s core argument seems to be, ‘Everything should be public, and messages should find the largest audience possible.’ Snapchat’s might be, ‘Communication should be private and ephemeral.’
Robin Sloan
The best argument I know for an immortal life is the existence of a man who deserves one.
William James
Frankly, the idea that exposed legs are some sort of sexual provocation is an argument one would expect to hear from a religious fundamentalist, not a feminist.
Kirsten Powers
LCD live was set up to be an argument about what’s wrong with bands and why bands should be better. I always thought that we were so obviously not a great band, comically not a great band. I was not a great front man.
James Murphy
That really has been my message over the years: ‘Hey, we’re all in this together, so let’s laugh about it a little, please.’ It adds perspective to an argument if you know where you’re coming from.
Jeff MacNelly
There’s nothing wrong with paying taxes; they should be paid in proportion to how rich you are. This idea that you’re going to get better growth by cutting taxes at the top has no historical justification. And it’s certainly not an argument in favor of capitalism.
John Ralston Saul
The best argument for mutual funds is that they offer safety and diversification. But they don’t necessarily offer safety and diversification.
Ron Chernow
There can be no argument about the Lone Star State’s significant contributions to American history, and we must remember the actions and the sacrifices of those who made Texas independence a reality.
Michael McCaul
The more important argument against grade curves is that they create an atmosphere that’s toxic by pitting students against one another. At best, it creates a hypercompetitive culture, and at worst, it sends students the message that the world is a zero-sum game: Your success means my failure.
Adam Grant
When I have an argument with someone, even with someone I am not very close with, I can’t sleep at night thinking about it. It’s terrible. But I still manage speak out frankly because I have also been gifted with the ability to read people. I can sense when they start to get irritated with me, and then, I shift.
Hans Rosling
The core hacker premise that ‘code wins arguments’ is just another way of saying that anything is worth trying, regardless of whether it is a conservative or liberal idea, and that whatever works is worth keeping.
Glenn Kelman
I will make the argument that we are poorly adapted to our current environment. I mean, we did not evolve to sit all day and be exposed to giant amounts of really tasty food.
George M. Church
The argument most commonly made in the filibuster’s favor is crudely partisan: ‘Our side may be in the majority now, but someday it will be in the minority, and when that happens we’ll want to block the other side’s extremist agenda.’
Timothy Noah
I can make a valid argument that Bobby Heenan is pro wrestling’s great performer.
Jim Ross
If you go away with, you know, a girlfriend, wife, whatever, you have an argument on holiday because you’re not used to spending that much time with people.
Karl Pilkington
I’ve learned to be true to yourself, stick to the big arguments, don’t get distracted by the everyday kerfuffle that is in the nature of any democratic system.
George Osborne
In the Freudian age, parents say to their children, ‘Don’t be defensive,’ meaning, ‘You have no argument,’ but I was born in the age of Rommel, when defense was considered an honorable thing.
Mark Helprin
Arguments of convenience lack integrity and inevitably trip you up.
Donald Rumsfeld
He who establishes his argument by noise and command shows that his reason is weak.
Michel de Montaigne
There will always be excuses, arguments, and questions of timing when moving on difficult and controversial issues.
Lara Giddings
Various are the pleas and arguments which men of corrupt minds frequently urge against yielding obedience to the just and holy commands of God.
George Whitefield
Candidate Trump had previously opined that ‘Islam hates us’ and had called for ‘the total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,’ an argument he has since modified and moderated.
Peter Bergen
Opposition to immigration is an emotional argument, and human beings are emotional, not robots powered by data.
Owen Jones
I have found you an argument; I am not obliged to find you an understanding.
James Boswell
There is some pretty powerful self-interest in wanting a future that is not just running storm-to-storm. The argument that I make is not that we aren’t competitive and selfish and greedy. We are. We’re all of these things. We’re complicated, competitive, greedy and nasty, and kind and generous and compassionate.
Naomi Klein
The main point for me is moral; animals are sentient beings. I know for some this is a hard argument to accept, but we’re not built to eat a lot of meat.
Grace Slick
I have argued about the future of fiction with jaded novelists, far-seeing postmodernists, technologists, television critics. The argument that future generations will not know the pleasures of the novel has been a staple of book reviewing since at least 1960.
Russell Smith
It does surprise me that intelligent people in the 21st century could claim that if you respond to the terrorists with force, you spawn terrorism, but if you appease them, you somehow tame them. This argument, as I said, is very interesting, and very surprising.
Meles Zenawi
In the United States, the government is bailing out banks, intervening in the economy, yet in Latin America, the Right continues to talk about ‘free markets.’ It’s totally outdated; they don’t have arguments; they don’t have any sense.
Hugo Chavez
While arguments rage about plant- versus meat-based diets, new technologies will soon make them irrelevant. Before long, most of our food will come neither from animals nor plants, but from unicellular life.
George Monbiot
Pentagon dollars are essentially seen as a different kind of funding that doesn’t have to stand for itself and make an argument for itself in the house of Congress.
Rachel Maddow
I got into an argument with my original publisher. They wanted me to do ‘Kitty’ and nothing else. I wanted to do lots of things, not just ‘Kitty’ books.
Carrie Vaughn
I don’t mind people writing about me. Personal attacks are different, but political arguments? I’m putting myself out there on a daily basis. I’m giving my opinion. So it only makes sense that others might differ and will criticize me.
Kimberly Guilfoyle
I’d like to see the argument made for greater worldwide federalism, not just the European Union.
Ben Miller
Well, it’s 15 years since Sex, Lies And Videotape, and if you hang around long enough you’re having the same arguments with just a new set of people every few years and it gets boring.
Steven Soderbergh
I guess some people are brilliant enough to be brilliant on their own and never doubt anything and come up with fabulous things. But I think it’s good to get into arguments with people and have them say, ‘That sucks’ or ‘You’re crazy’ or ‘That’s cheesy’ or ‘What do you think of this?’
Madonna Ciccone
I’m not a confrontational person in real life, so I really don’t wanna get into arguments or fistfights with people I’m making fun of.
Andy Kindler
One of the arguments I make for the failure of the euro is that, at the time it was being constructed, there was a ‘neo-liberal’ ideology which said that all we need to do to make this thing work is to get deficits low, keep inflation low, and take down barriers, and then everything would be fine.
Joseph Stiglitz
Never preach a sermon without a text from the Bible, a text containing the theme which you can elaborate. The text is the best proof in support of your argument. A sermon without a text is an argument without a proof.
Isaac Mayer Wise
The only thing that permits human beings to collaborate with one another in a truly open-ended way is their willingness to have their beliefs modified by new facts. Only openness to evidence and argument will secure a common world for us.
Sam Harris
He who threatens us will find us deaf to his threats. We are willing to listen only to rational arguments.
Menachem Begin
You don’t do a play to compete for an award. This was the argument I always had over the Oscars. I didn’t win them. They were given to me. All I did was 2 films. People always say the analogy is Olympic gold medals.
Glenda Jackson
Be part of the solution and answer to the problem versus part of the problem and continuing argument around it.
David Pratt
So many times I’ve heard people say that the right to marry for gay and lesbian couples won’t really change anything other than some legal and financial stuff. It’s a dumb argument: those legal and financial effects matter.
Alice Dreger
If the Democrats want to make an efficacy or merit-based argument with respect to the Electoral College, then by all means make it. It ought to be based in history and fact not fanciful revisionist history, and it should be made not just during an election year because of discontent with the electoral outcome.
Kayleigh McEnany
In the works of Duchamp, space begins to walk and take on form; it becomes a machine that spins arguments and philosophizes; it resists movement with delay and delay with irony.
Octavio Paz
There are so many ridiculous arguments that MMA is somehow anti-woman.
Ronda Rousey
During Seattle’s successful campaign for a $15 an hour minimum wage, our opponents would sometimes roll their eyes and snort, ‘If $15 is so good, why not $50?’ It was a straw man argument: Nobody was proposing a $50 minimum wage; it would have been too high, and we said so.
Nick Hanauer
For decades, the pro-life movement has focused on scientific evidence and ethical arguments.
Michael J. Knowles
There have been no sects in the Christian world, however absurd, which have not endeavoured to support their opinions by arguments drawn from Scripture.
Laurence Sterne
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.
Brit Hume
When you let someone else win an argument, often you both end up winners.
Richard Carlson
A lot of people want to know why did I leave the BBC: did I have an argument with them? No! I had 13 wonderful years. But it was time. Since I left university, I’d only ever worked for the BBC. It was simply time.
Richard Quest
For good ideas and true innovation, you need human interaction, conflict, argument, debate.
Margaret Heffernan
You can win more arguments then you might think as a writer, even though you legally have no recourse, and your script can get muddied and altered in any way possible. You can use reason, logic, and passion to argue persuasively for a case in your favor.
Shane Black
News, by and large, has been the purest of all the television mediums, or at least we’ve tried to keep it that way, and there constantly is the argument about the separation between church and state.
Leslie Moonves
My main argument is that environmental destruction comes when people externalise their costs and pass them on to future generations. That is obviously something that large enterprises do and they become large by doing it.
Roger Scruton
The Democrats need to be confident about making their argument… and making sure that everybody knows we care about them.
Jason Kander
In Don Mills in the Sixties, nothing comes close to the humiliation of losing an argument. In our weird little creative circle, no one cares who has faster fists, but to lose an argument suggests inferior intelligence.
Dan Hill
The Queen rarely loses her temper, but when she does, she brooks no argument.
Ingrid Seward
I used to think that my mother got into arguments with people because they didn’t understand her English, because she was Chinese.
Amy Tan
This is the heart of my argument: We can put more pressure on the antagonist for whom we show human concern.
Barbara Deming
There was that argument that if we had more women in positions of authority, the world would be a nicer place. And then we got Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, Indira Gandhi. When women become acclimatised to war, they can become every bit as ruthless as men.
Margaret MacMillan
A knock-down argument; ’tis but a word and a blow.
John Dryden
Washington is filled with people making other people’s arguments for money.
Jon Lovett
I know I deal with it, I’m sure a lot of other people deal with it: you have that little funny dig you want to give on Twitter or you want to put in your column. Don’t do it. it always undermines your argument.
Kirsten Powers
There was a very convincing argument made that the extremists have won and the aggression is now supported by the majority, therefore fighting until surrender was the only alternative.
Joichi Ito
We sometimes hear the argument, ‘All the world’ thinks this, or does that, given as a reason for our doing likewise; but that is an argument that should have no weight with the Christian, who is commanded not to be conformed to the world.
Hudson Taylor
The more history I learnt, the less interested I got in winning arguments and the more interested in establishing the truth.
Hilary Mantel
My life is my argument.
Albert Schweitzer
Vegetarians have been around for a very long time – Pythagoreans forbade eating animals more than 2,500 years ago – but even as the environmental evidence mounted, they didn’t appear to be winning the argument.
Tristram Stuart
My father was a professor of folklore, and my mother was a teacher until she was married. I had a good relationship with them, and the only argument we had was when I went to university and wanted to go into the theater instead of studying to be a lawyer.
Max von Sydow
As much as the constitutional argument matters to me, what really matters to me is this sort of moral question of can we order somebody to risk their lives about a military mission if we’re not willing to debate, vote, and say that the military mission matters?
Tim Kaine
‘Treme’ begins after Hurricane Katrina, and it’s a year-by-year account of how everyday people there put their lives back together. It’s sort of a testament to, or an argument for why, a great American city like New Orleans needs to be saved and preserved.
George Pelecanos
Insolence is not logic; epithets are the arguments of malice.
Robert Green Ingersoll
It’s one thing if you’re a part of teams that won five championships. But it’s an extremely different argument if you’re a big reason for those championships.
Troy Aikman
Even if it’s a thriller or a comedy, it’s always a love story for me, and that’s what I concentrate on, because the love stories are my surrogates for the argument: two people in conflict that see life differently.
Sydney Pollack
Trump makes really, really powerful arguments, for example in relation to healthcare. He talks about the cartels and the concentration of power and the health insurance companies effectively having monopolies and ripping people off.
Steve Hilton
The Bible nowhere enters into an argument to prove the person and being of God. It assumes His being and reveals His person and character.
Edward McKendree Bounds
It used to upset me – now it makes me sad – to see people use patriotism and our troops as a pawn in their political argument. Because I know personally, growing up in a military family, the sacrifice that is made on a daily basis.
Tamron Hall
We don’t argue if drug companies create drugs that can cure humans and charge lots of money for them, even though we all have these diseases. It will be pretty hard to make a different argument for genes.
Leroy Hood
The death penalty and the arguments it inspires don’t only involve ethics, morals, and justice. There are bureaucratic and economic aspects to it as well. All these different aspects commingle in ways that convince me we should take whatever steps we can to abolish the death penalty.
Reid Hoffman
Calling Rand Paul ‘the most interesting man in politics’ is an invitation to an argument – but one we suspect he’d love to have.
Nancy Gibbs
Arguments are to be avoided: they are always vulgar and often convincing.
Oscar Wilde
My husband was a serial adulterer, and there was nothing I could do about it: no questions I could ask him, no argument I could have with him, no explanation he could give me or pleas he could make for forgiveness.
Ingrid Seward
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.
Al Franken
When you label them, when one of the most powerful social media companies in the world labels people as Nazis, you could make the argument that’s inciting violence.
Dan Crenshaw
You can make a very good argument that society would be much worse off if you let 10 rapists and murderers free rather than put one poor, wrongly accused accountant in prison. And so my only point on that is that it should open up an argument. It should not sort of settle one, because nobody disagrees with it.
Jonah Goldberg
I’ve never been mugged, never really experienced street fear. In fact, I’m the one who gets into arguments because I don’t keep my mouth shut.
Jodie Whittaker
I would never say don’t have an argument.
Claire Fox
A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
Whenever you can manoeuvre your characters into a situation where they both have a good argument to make, you’re on the right track.
Marc Guggenheim
My life experience confirms that the U.S. government frequently overclassifies data. But that’s a stronger argument for not dumping large volumes of government traffic on an unclassified personal server than it is a justification for retroactively challenging classification decisions.
Michael Hayden
Their argument is that most shows are losers, which is true, but it’s also disingenuous to say, ‘We are not going to take the risk unless it is totally covered by the few successful shows that are out there.’
Dick Wolf
I build no system. I ask an end to privilege, the abolition of slavery, equality of rights, and the reign of law. Justice, nothing else; that is the alpha and omega of my argument: to others I leave the business of governing the world.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
I never had any arguments with Pirlo.
Massimiliano Allegri
A poet’s work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
Salman Rushdie
It’s a tough one for me, politics. I grew up in a house where my father is a Christian book salesman and a Tory, and my mum’s a social worker. So I can always see the benefits of both arguments.
James Corden
‘Fan’ is an understatement. I had the Spider-Man costume, I had bed sheets, toys, you name it. I’ve always had an argument with my best friend that Spider-Man was way better than Batman. I was a massive fan growing up.
Tom Holland
Big Water makes an argument straight out of Economics 101. The best way to deliver water to people’s homes efficiently, the water barons argue, is to put the process in the hands of the market. If water is scarce, then raise the price – let the law of supply and demand take over!
Charles C. Mann
My parents started questioning me about whether or not I was transgender – whether or not I was trying to be a woman. It was a big argument.
James Charles
I spent nearly two decades as a social worker and an educator with kids. So, my whole life has been about helping middle-class families. So it’s just kind of a hollow argument to say I’m not a family person.
Kyrsten Sinema
You can’t argue that you have to have art, and prove it to anybody. Why should I give $1,000 to art when there are people starving? Of course, that’s true. But just because you can’t, theoretically, defend the arts, or make a sensible argument for their preservation, doesn’t mean they’re not important.
Dakin Matthews
I’d like to do policy and I’d like to do philosophy, I’d like to be able to get into the depth, into the meat of the argument – that’s the kind of stuff I want to do.
Jonathan Krohn
I passionately believe that’s it’s not just what you say that counts, it’s also how you say it – that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it.
Alain de Botton
I decided to get to know my opponents and their arguments.
Lech Walesa
Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everyone in good society holds exactly the same opinion.
Oscar Wilde
Conservatives have long argued, correctly, that ‘fine-tuning’ the economy is a chimera, but that argument seems to have disappeared from the conservative handbook.
Alex Tabarrok
I always get everyone prepared so there aren’t so many arguments on set. I have a policy that the first thing I do in the morning is go over to the trailers and discuss exactly what we’re shooting that day. It’s time-consuming, but it reduces the chances of ‘misunderstandings’ on set.
Tony Scott
I think what I and most other sociologists of religion wrote in the 1960s about secularization was a mistake. Our underlying argument was that secularization and modernity go hand in hand. With more modernization comes more secularization.
Peter L. Berger
If your first objective in the negotiation, instead of making your argument, is to hear the other side out, that’s the only way you can quiet the voice in the other guy’s mind. But most people don’t do that.
Christopher Voss
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?
Robert Walpole
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.
E. P. Thompson
The most important guideline when it comes to argument is the golden rule. If someone were addressing your point, what tone, what overall approach would you find persuasive and want her to use? Whatever that is, do it yourself.
Barry Eisler
I’ve heard the argument that unemployment benefits somehow act as a disincentive to the long-term unemployed when it comes to looking for work, but the opposite is true. Unemployment Insurance serves as a powerful incentive for people to keep searching for jobs, rather than drop out of the labor force altogether.
Tom Perez
Good argument is intended to persuade another.
Barry Eisler
We all resort to the ad hominem from time to time: in human affairs, it is difficult to avoid it, and probably not desirable. After all, our opponents are human. The proper use of an ad hominem argument, however, still requires evidence to back it up.
Theodore Dalrymple
There is definitely an argument that Sergio Aguero is the Premier League’s best ever striker.
Shaun Wright-Phillips
I think it’s always dangerous to make political arguments in a religiously ideological way. And it’s very dangerous to treat as traitors to the American nation those who think differently.
Adam Michnik
Belief contains so many truths pertaining to God’s Names and the realities contained in the universe that the most perfect science, knowledge, and virtue is belief and knowledge of God originating in a belief based on argument and investigation.
Said Nursi
I should have known better. Pro-life arguments are now based on scientific evidence and the pro-choice arguments are not. That is a cultural, historical fact.
Stanley Fish
Power is getting things done without having to demonstrate that you can bulldoze it through. I’m most effective when I’ve studied an issue, when I can make a credible argument, and then bring people along.
Donna Edwards
Societies have debated the severity of punishment for vile acts over millennia, with complex moral arguments on both sides of the question. But citizens and society should pay more attention to the trend of over-criminalisation of common human failings and frailties.
Rohini Nilekani
‘The Ballad of Black Tom’ was written, in part, during the latest round of arguments about H. P. Lovecraft’s legacy as both a great writer and a prejudiced man. I grew up worshipping the guy, so this issue felt quite personal to me.
Victor LaValle
Peer mediation is a chance for students to work with other students to help them resolve problems, arguments, disagreements without having to get the teacher or the administration involved.
Janet Reno
I first became a vegetarian when I was nine, in response to an argument made by a radical babysitter. My great change – which lasted a couple of weeks – was based on the very simple instinct that it’s wrong to kill animals for food.
Jonathan Safran Foer
The thorniest business problems will surface at the board meetings, and the different, sharp opinions help to better explore the poles of the arguments to make better decisions.
Scott Weiss
The argument of the broken window pane is the most valuable argument in modern politics.
Emmeline Pankhurst
The media love coarse debate because coarse debate drives ratings and ratings generate profits. Unless the TV producer happens to be William Shakespeare, an argument is more interesting than a soliloquy – and there will never be a shortage of people willing to argue on TV.
John Sununu
I would sort out all the arguments and see which belonged to fear and which to creativeness. Other things being equal, I would make the decision which had the larger number of creative reasons on its side.
Katharine Butler Hathaway
When a thing is true, there is no need to use any arguments to substantiate it.
Vinoba Bhave
The Jews integrated themselves into American life to the point that the argument that the Jews aren’t American sounded so stupid, that people stopped thinking it.
Reza Aslan
Our arguments – and those of hundreds more Venezuelans suffering the same injustice – are clear and forceful: political disqualification violates laws in Venezuela and throughout the continent.
Leopoldo Lopez
When a person has a gun, sometimes their mind clicks that this thing will win arguments and straighten people out.
Bill Cosby
The conservative argument is that the economy is like the weather, that it just operates automatically.
Sidney Blumenthal
Even in the beginning, when we knew there was a legal argument about how much our song sounds like his song, as one songwriter to another, I wasn’t sure that Cat Stevens would take that as bad.
Wayne Coyne
I suppose I was very disappointed that I was injured during training for Korea. In fact, I had an argument with a grenade and it won, and consequently I was forced to come back to Australia for twelve months.
Peter Scott
The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.
George Bernard Shaw
Climate change denial, anti-vaccination proponents, creationist teachers, faith healers, fake bomb detector peddlers, psychic frauds, alternative medicine pushers… we need scientific thinking. We need a generation of kids who think an experiment is more important than a preconceived notion or an argument from authority.
Kyle Hill
When you’re taking the country through difficult times and difficult decisions you’ve got to take the country with you. That means permanently trying to make the argument that what you’re doing is fair and seen to be fair.
David Cameron
Of all the arguments against voluntary euthanasia, the most influential is the ‘slippery slope’: once we allow doctors to kill patients, we will not be able to limit the killing to those who want to die.
Peter Singer
It was a mistake. On the information we had, we shouldn’t have prosecuted the war. We shouldn’t have changed our argument from international law to regime change in a non-transparent way. It was an error for which we as a country paid a heavy price, and for which many people paid with their lives.
Ed Balls
I’m a politician. I’m not going to get into a whole range of scientific argument with scientists.
Tony Abbott
Nothing does reason more right, than the coolness of those that offer it: For Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders, than from the arguments of its opposers.
William Penn
If you lose an argument it doesn’t mean you change your mind but you have to accept the decision.
Claire Fox
I used to be a wannabe Genghis Khan and will always be that. He never lost any battles. Then I swung to the other side of the spectrum and settled on Mr. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Now I realise I should identify myself with those who strengthen my argument.
Kamal Haasan
I’m not scared of diversity. We have to have debates and win the argument, and if there are amendments that need to be brought up so we find out where the party is, so be it.
Jason Chaffetz
I’ve scaled back my involvement with Twitter; it’s too easy to get dragged into an argument.
Charlie Brooker
Jesus did not get stuck in intellectual arguments with people. He did not go for the intellect; He went for the conscience. He spoke to that part of the person that knows the difference between right and wrong instinctively.
Kirk Cameron
Sometimes we deny being worthy of praise, hoping to generate an argument we would be pleased to lose.
Cullen Hightower
The arguments over the limits that may be put on individuals suspected of sympathising with the enemy have occurred over the centuries. Habeas corpus was suspended during the Napoleonic wars, and Defence Regulation 18b was applied during the Second World War.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Reasoned arguments and suggestions which make allowance for the full difficulties of the state of war that exists may help, and will always be listened to with respect and sympathy.
Stafford Cripps
I still quite enjoy watching Fox News because I think it makes me think through my arguments and make sure I’m on the right side.
Brianna Wu
We should continue to mobilise against the destruction of the world’s great habitats, and its terrifying implications. But the most persuasive argument we can make is to show we mean it, by restoring our own lost wonders.
George Monbiot
Bluster, sputter, question, cavil; but be sure your argument be intricate enough to confound the court.
William Wycherley
I bristle a little when the argument for film gets put into the nostalgia ghetto. Film is still the highest quality and best-looking image capture medium available. I don’t think it always will be. The digital image will get better, and it will eventually surpass the quality of the film image, but it isn’t there yet.
Rian Johnson
Every work of history is a combination of argument and narrative. The longer I write, the more I emphasize the narrative, the story, and the less attention I give to the argument. Arguments come and go.
H. W. Brands
I think digital is getting so much better. It’s harder and harder to make the argument now for film. All things being equal, though, I still prefer to capture on film.
Lenny Abrahamson
When we think about global warming at all, the arguments tend to be ideological, theological and economic.
Bill McKibben
There is a definite argument to be made that videogames are becoming an art form put together by artists of different types.
John Romero
A review was published in Nature, very scathing, essentially calling me incompetent, though they didn’t use that word. I am putting a reply on my Web site in a few days, where I go through their arguments, paragraph by paragraph.
Bjorn Lomborg
A real pleasure is a pleasure that one enjoys by one’s self, without a companion, and without a single argument.
Sholom Aleichem
The Gottman Institute’s study about arguments in long-term relationships concludes that couples with the best chance at long-term success are the ones with a low negativity threshold: if something’s wrong, they speak up about it immediately. That’s something I’ve taken on board.
Hannah Fry
As a Jew, I believe that every argument has a counterargument.
Howard Jacobson
Let us face it: in the world today, money and economic strength remain more powerful arguments than the number of people you represent.
Guy Verhofstadt
Unfortunately, things are different in climate science because the arguments have become heavily politicised. To say that the dogmas are wrong has become politically incorrect.
Freeman Dyson
To be considered presidential timber, there has to be a measure in the way you present your argument.
Judy Sheindlin
Philosophy has to be enquiring; it can take nothing on faith, and its methods are based not on the blind acceptance of authority, but on establishing truths by reason and argument.
Julian Baggini
The conflict between secular Zionism and the settler movement did not appear overnight following Israel’s conquests in the 1967 war, for there was an argument that bridged the gap: security.
Elliott Abrams
AIDS is an absolutely tragic disease. The argument about AIDS’ being some kind of divine retribution is crap.
Calvin Klein
I can understand the argument that the captain should always be there to lead from the front.
Andrew Strauss
It’s impossible for a couple to bring up two children without having lots and lots of arguments.
Chris Rea
This band has never had an argument. It’s just amazing.
Dave Edmunds
The safety argument against steroids may be a good one, but let’s be honest. It isn’t the one that motivates most officials and fans to frown on steroids. Steroid use does not just seem risky or unnatural, it seems to disrupt the level playing field.
Alice Dreger
Political linguists have argued that the right often uses stories to make an argument, while the left falls back on facts and statistics.
Owen Jones
Our argument is everybody ought to be paying lower rates, and we ought to be focused on growing the economy and rebuilding the middle class.
Steve Scalise
There’s been this argument about Coldplay stealing this melody from Joe Satriani, but, if you listen to it, it’s mine! It’s the ‘Foreigner Suite,’ it is!
Cat Stevens
It’s all very boring to say that we get along great and all that and sometimes we mock up come aggravation to make it interesting but the truth of it is that we get along so well we’ve never had an argument.
Dave Edmunds
Whenever you’re going into oral argument, it’s preferable to be able to weave the arguments together. That gets harder when you split the argument into pieces.
Eugene Scalia
On the stage, the characters express themselves more through words than images. So the arguments of the characters and the tension between characters – words have to be used to express that, and I love that about theater.
Alan Alda
I always felt like I could participate at the adult table, but I also knew that if you’re going to make an argument about something, you better have something good to say.
Meena Harris
Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.
Rebecca West
Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
Milton Friedman
Studies show when people yell, they get themselves even angrier. Interesting factoid: If you and/or your partner’s heartbeat becomes higher than 100 beats per minute during an argument, you will not be able to fully understand/process what the other is saying.
Karen Salmansohn
Hardly anybody realizes that the first couple of chapters of ‘Coming Apart’ were basically a recapitulation of the argument in ‘The Bell Curve.’ That’s how little people focused on ‘The Bell Curve’s’ real message.
Charles Murray
The question of one versus two species of African elephants isn’t about settling an arcane DNA argument; it’s about life or death for these majestic, extraordinary creatures.
Lydia Millet
There has long been an argument in New York about what, exactly, the purpose of book awards ought to be. One model sees them as a celebration of the unquestioned best and brightest, a triumphal parade for marquee authors who have published in a given year.
Michelle Dean
When my mother passed away, we knew what she wanted on her tombstone, so I asked my father, so there wouldn’t be any argument among us children, ‘Daddy, what do you want on your tombstone?’ He thought about that. He said, ‘preacher.’ So that’s what’s going to be on his tombstone. Preacher.
Franklin Graham
I think a lot of Marx was quite sloppy. There was all sorts of politically aggressive language when he lacked arguments for things.
Robert Nozick
It’s important to remember that Britain was the first country to industrialize, so I think there’s a strong argument to say this is where my profession was founded.
Jonathan Ive
There’s the argument that you can relate to someone who’s completely unrelatable. In the way that a director shows you his imagination on a film, then I get to show you my imagination in a big dumb character.
Idris Elba
It is an excellent rule to be observed in all disputes, that men should give soft words and hard arguments; that they should not so much strive to vex as to convince each other.
John Wilkins
The Republican argument that raising the debt ceiling encourages additional future spending is logically irresponsible. The debt ceiling has to be raised to authorize spending already approved by Congress. Despite that fallacy, the GOP has been able to score political points with its argument.
Eliot Spitzer
The idea that a congressman would be tainted by accepting money from private industry or private sources is essentially a socialist argument.
Newt Gingrich
Once conscription was introduced during the First World War, and once Britain’s wars ceased being confined to the empire or to continental Europe and began seriously threatening our own shores and safety, it became much easier to denounce any anti-war agitation and argument as inherently irresponsible and unpatriotic.
Linda Colley
The aim of argument, or of discussion, should not be victory, but progress.
Joseph Joubert
Emotions may win arguments, but they don’t win wars.
Kathleen Troia McFarland
I believe that a work of art, like metaphors in language, can ask the most serious, difficult questions in a way which really makes the readers answer for themselves; that the work of art far more than an essay or a tract involves the reader, challenges him directly and brings him into the argument.
George Steiner
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.
Michael Servetus
Those who say that the West and Islam are eternally irreconcilable have more in common with the Islam extremists than they might like to think, for it’s the very same argument of course advanced by Al-Qaida. And they do have it wrong. We need to work with mainstream Islam.
Pauline Neville-Jones
I am such a coward when it comes to political arguments. I tend to sort of recoil rather than engage.
John Lithgow
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.
William Henry Moody
When I’m down, I talk to myself a lot. I look crazy because I’m constantly having an argument with myself.
Serena Williams
I find that when I’m in an argument and I’m angry, I can’t even form a sentence well. You say something and then later you’re like ‘That’s not even what I meant at all!’
Finneas
There are millions of Americans outside Washington who are tired of stale political arguments and are moving this country forward. They believe, and I believe, that here in America, our success should depend not on accident of birth, but the strength of our work ethic and the scope of our dreams.
Barack Obama
Every argument on lynching in the South gets back sooner or later to the question of rape.
Ray Stannard Baker
Before impugning an opponent’s motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments.
Sidney Hook
The argument that gay marriage doesn’t affect straight marriages is a ridiculous red herring: Gay marriage affects society and law in dramatic ways. Religious groups will come under direct assault as federal and state governments move to strip them of their non-profit statuses if they refuse to perform gay marriages.
Ben Shapiro
Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate and doubt, to offer a solution everybody can understand.
Colin Powell
Argument is to me the air I breathe. Given any proposition, I cannot help believing the other side and defending it.
Gertrude Stein
When people make the educated argument that things should go back, it’s more like going back to a feeling they had when they heard some of the music that came out. Not going back to that music being rehashed. That’s stupid.
Adrian Younge
When you’re on tour you definitely don’t want lots of arguments. It’s very important that everybody gets on because you’re in close proximity a great deal of the time.
Joan Armatrading
The Obama administration is fighting to block access to names of visitors to the White House, taking up the Bush administration argument that a president doesn’t have to reveal who comes calling to influence policy decisions.
Bill Dedman
The only driver stronger than an economic argument to do something is the war argument, the I-don’t-want-to-die argument.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
All modern secularity requires is that our public norms and the arguments for them not presuppose common acceptance of Jewish or Christian revelation, even if these public norms are consistent with a particular community’s revelation and the authoritative teachings it derives from that revelation.
David Novak
Don’t take the wrong side of an argument just because your opponent has taken the right side.
Baltasar Gracian
My coach and I will have these arguments where I am in pain or something is wrong, and I won’t tell him because I feel like I need to train. We have a blow-up of arguments, and he says, ‘Shelly, you need to tell me when these things are happening.’
Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce
Truth springs from argument amongst friends.
David Hume
My wife was too beautiful for words, but not for arguments.
John Barrymore
If I wasn’t the sort of character that I am, if I was shy, I would have been intimidated by it. I stood up to it; I used to have arguments every day in the street. I was constantly told I wanted to be a boy. People used to say I was a boy.
Toni Duggan
Newspapers and their editors have to become as accountable as the rest of us – they are not ‘a special case,’ and they have only themselves to blame for having lost the argument for ‘exceptionalism’ – and with it the right to ‘self-regulation.’
David Puttnam
Unfortunately, instead of standing up to Iran, the Obama administration is giving in to the Iranians’ bizarre tantrums and illogical arguments.
Mike Pompeo
When you’ve been playing the game for so long and sports for so long, it can take a toll on your body, and that’s what we’re putting on the line, and that’s what our argument is as players when we’re doing negotiations and stuff like that.
Ed Reed
Men’s arguments often prove nothing but their wishes.
Charles Caleb Colton
My argument is that charity does indeed start at home, but it doesn’t stop there.
Andrew Mitchell
Denialist arguments are often bolstered by accurate information taken wildly out of context, wielded selectively, and supported by fake experts who often don’t seem fake at all.
Michael Specter
When I did ‘Bremner, Bird and Fortune’ I think it was accepted that comedians can contest the arguments just as well as journalists.
Rory Bremner
If a work alienates a reader, should that be counted against it? I respect people that love ‘Ulysses,’ for example, but I’m on the other side of the argument. ‘Ulysses’ would be better if it seduced me. But I probably have the minority point of view.
B. J. Novak
For a southern belle, my grandmother was remarkably modern. She threw my grandfather out, for one thing – some kind of argument about bourbon whiskey – shortly after the birth of their third child, and then went back to school to get herself a teaching certificate.
Preston Sturges
The Courtroom is a battlefield, and oral argument requires a fair amount of verbal jousting and sparring with the Justices.
Lisa Blatt
If a person can be said to have the wrong attitude, there is no need to pay attention to his arguments.
John McCarthy
A good argument, like a good dialogue, is always a proof of life, but I’d much rather go and read a book.
Ali Smith
I’ve been trying to make this argument that digital comics and print comics are both art, but there are subtle differences.
Jim Lee
Nothing sways the stupid more than arguments they can’t understand.
Jean Francois Paul de Gondi
We can’t be anti-everything – we need an energy plan that adds up. But there’s a lack of numeracy in the public discussion of energy. Where people do use numbers, they select them to sound big and score points in arguments, rather than to aid thoughtful discussion.
David J. C. MacKay
On every single picture on my Instagram page, you’ll find a negative comment. My supporters will normally stand up to that hateful person, and then it will become a big argument, and it’s just a lot. I try to tell myself not to listen to the haters, and I try not to read the comments because it’s not worth it.
Jazz Jennings
Everybody is struggling for the good things of the world, and all the arguments to prove that they are not desirable are worse than wasted.
Orison Swett Marden
Big History’s not going to replace existing educational courses. It’s not an attack on specialisation. It is simply the argument that specialisation needs to be complemented with an overview, which I think is scientific commonsense.
David Christian
One of the main arguments that I make in my new book, ‘The Great Degeneration,’ is that the rule of law in the U.S. is becoming the rule of lawyers.
Niall Ferguson
I dropped out of high school when I was 16, after I had a huge argument with my English teacher over the meaning of the word ‘existentialism.’
Craig Ferguson
