Quotes About Argumentation

#1. The chief lesson to be learnt from it is the futility of all argumentation that precedes understanding. We cannot profitably attack any opinion until we have discovered what it expresses as well as what it states.

Ivor A. Richards

#2. Wikipedia [ ... ] is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation.

Clay Shirky

#3. It is incumbent upon philosophy ... to provide a refuge for freedom. Not that there is any hope that it could break the political tendencies that are throttling freedom throughout the world both from within and without and whose violence permeates the very fabric of philosophical argumentation.

Theodor Adorno

#4. The theological contacts between Jews and Christians during much of the premodern period are best characterized as disputations. Even when not engaged in face-to-face argumentation, Jews and Christians spoke about each other in essentially disputational terms.

David Novak

#5. I believe because I am told to believe ... My faith is faith; it is not evolved out of argumentation, nor does it seek the aid of that.

Christina Rossetti

#6. As a science, logic institutes an analysis of the process of the mind in reasoning, and investigating the principles on which argumentation is conducted; as an art, it furnishes such rules as may be derived from those principles, for guarding against erroneous deductions.

Richard Whately

#7. What counts as rational argumentation is as historically determined and as context-dependent, as what counts as good French.

Richard Rorty

#8. The employment of the word Logic to denote the theory of Argumentation, is derived from the Aristotelian, or, as they are commonly termed, the scholastic, logicians.

John Stuart Mill

#9. Progress and Poverty was the most closely knit, fascinating, and convincing specimen of argumentation that, I believe, ever sprang from the mind of man.

Scott Brooks

#10. I don't like argumentation. You men do it a lot, don't you? You seem to enjoy it. I'm always amazed at how men can go on and on, happily passing around the empty cup of some futile discussion

Soseki Natsume

#11. When an apologist attempts to be autonomous in his reasoned argumentation he indicates that he considers God to be less certain than his own existence and that he places greater credence in his independent reasoning than in God's Word.

Greg L. Bahnsen

#12. Truth is not a matter of argumentation and conviction; it is not the outcome of opinion.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

#13. In learning and argumentation, the quality brain is similar to a facility of maximum security. What passes the logic test, free of fallacy and pretense, then must pass the test of biblical accuracy in order to proceed as an adopted, reliable truth.

Criss Jami

#14. Obama's style of argumentation is unlike any president I have ever met, and I've met a lot of them. And the condescension that oozes from him when he's talking about his opponents, it's really striking.

Paul Gigot

#15. If thou continuous to take delight in idle argumentation thou mayest be qualified to combat with the sophists, but will never know how to live with men.

Socrates

#16. Replace anger with peace,moderation and clear argumentation. It hurts more the other side!

Dionisis Agelakis

#17. The Heaneys were aristocrats, in the sense that they took for granted a code of behavior that was given and unspoken. Argumentation, persuasion, speech itself, for God's sake, just seemed otiose and superfluous to them.

Seamus Heaney

#18. I do not think that the real reason why people accept religion has anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds.

Bertrand Russell

#19. They [human beings] are unwilling to gamble that God made those people who are skilled at rational argumentation uniquely virtuous. They protect themselves and others from cleverness by obscuring their preferences.

James G. March

#20. There was a certain amount of initial argumentation about the "meaning" of the balloon; this subsided, because we have learned not to insist on meanings, and they are rarely even looked for now, except in cases involving the simplest, safest phenomena.

Donald Barthelme

#21. Do not dispute with anyone in any matter as far as possible. For in argumentation lies much harm and its evil is greater than its benefit.

Al-Ghazali

#22. For authors, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line only if you are writing the letter I.

Michael A. Arnzen

#23. De Bono argues that the West's tradition of settling disagreement by debate or argument is an example of overreliance on logic.

Steve Volk

#24. Logic, it is often said, is the study of valid arguments. It is a systematic attempt to distinguish valid arguments from invalid arguments.

W.H. Newton-Smith

#25. Time spent arguing is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.

Christopher Hitchens

#26. The only way to efficiently battle evil is to copy enough to know how to counter each argument, yet not enough to believe all the bullshit.

Will Advise

#27. It would behoove you to have your thesis finely tuned and the logical arguments utilized in support of it tightly woven into a credible, and creatively persuasive tapestry.

R. Alan Woods

#28. It's often a bad sign when people defend themselves against charges which haven't been made.

Christopher Hitchens

#29. Cursed luck! - said he, biting his lip as he shut the door, - for man to be master of one of the finest chains of reasoning in nature, - and have a wife at the same time with such a head-piece, that he cannot hang up a single inference within side of it, to save his soul from destruction.

Laurence Sterne

#30. A sure sign of ineptitude and malice is manifested when one's attacker is willing to cover himself with mud in order to try and make some of it adhere to his target.

Christopher Hitchens