argument quotes

Abraham Lincoln: 

When I'm getting ready to reason with a man, I spend one-third of my time thinking about myself and what I am going to say -- and two-thirds thinking about him and what he is going to say.

Colette: 

My dear sir, they don't debate. Each of them merely issues an ultimatum, and in what a tone! It all goes to show what extraordinary people they are, each more unequivocal than the other. - "The Old Lady and the Bear"

Daniel Dennett: 

There's nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view that I hold dear.

David Hume: 

Truth springs from argument amongst friends.

Edna St. Vincent Millay: 

Life is a quest and love a quarrel ...

Gay Hendricks: 

One of the first things a relationship therapist learns is that couples argue to burn up energy that could be used for something else. In fact, arguments often serve the purpose of using up energy, so that the couple do not have to take the courageous, creative leap into an unknown they fear. Arguing serves the function of being a zone of familiarity into which you can retreat when you are afraid of making a creative breakthrough.

Jack Lynch: 

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.

Jonathan Kozol: 

Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win. On Being a Teacher

Jonathan Swift: 

Argument is the worst sort of conversation.

Leonardo da Vinci: 

Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.

Marie Ebner von Eschenbach: 

Whenever two good people argue over principles, they are both right.

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach: 

Fear not those who argue but those who dodge.

Mary Pettibone Poole: 

To repeat what others have said, requires education, to challenge it,
requires brains.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

Nor knowest thou what argument
Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent.
All are needed by each one;
Nothing is fair or good alone.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

Put the argument into a concrete shape, into an image, some hard phrase, round and solid as a ball, which they can see and handle and carry home with them, and the cause is half won.

Sam Adams: 

It is no dishonor to be in a minority in the cause of liberty and virtue.

Virginia Woolf: 

When an arguer argues dispassionately he thinks only of the argument.