Quotes About Straw Man

#1. (For the uninitiated, "ectoplasm" is a ghostly kind of stuff that writers like Dennett are constantly accusing critics of materialism of believing in. It plays the same sort of straw-man role in his writings on the mind that Paley does in Dawkins's writings on religion.)

Edward Feser

#2. For thousands of years, human beings have been obsessed with beauty, truth, love, honor, altruism, courage, social relationships, art, and God. They all go together as subjective experiences, and it's a straw man to set God up as the delusion. If he is, then so is truth itself or beauty itself.

Deepak Chopra

#3. You can't make Howard Dean a straw man. He is what he appears to be. And that's the beauty of Howard Dean.

Howard Dean

#4. When your opponent sets up a straw man, set it on fire and kick the cinders around the stage. Don't worry about losing the Strawperson- American community vote.

James Lileks

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. It seems the most common thing for serial interventionists to do these days is to lob the term 'isolationist' at anyone who does not agree with their latest folly, and then set up a straw man about those people not wanting to be involved in the world.

Rand Paul

#8. The noun phrase straw man, now used as a compound adjective as in 'straw-man device, technique or issue,' was popularized in American culture by 'The Wizard of Oz.'

William Safire

#9. The marketing people are always talking about something called 'consumers'. I have this image of a fat little man in baggy Bermuda shorts, a Hawaiian shirt, and a straw hat with beer-can openers dangling from it, clutching fistfuls of dollars.

Robert James Waller

#10. Small causes are sufficient to make a man uneasy, when great ones are not in the way: for want of a block he will stumble at a straw.

Jonathan Swift

#11. The sound man, immune as to a sacrifice of straw dogs, faces the passing human generations.

Frederick Lenz

#12. The king greeted the document (the Collectanea) not so much as a drowning man greets a straw but as he might a rescue party from outer space.

Eric Ives

#13. 'This is how democracy works,' Barack Obama lectured the country before giving everyone the specifics of his expansive one-man executive overreach on immigration. If you enjoy platitudinous straw men but are turned off by open debate and constitutional order, this speech was for you.

David Harsanyi

#14. Every man's life is a train made of straw which tries to move on a track made of fire! The very next stop is ashes and dust.

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#15. Let an ill man lie in thy straw, and he looks to be thy heire.

George Herbert

#16. I can't tell if a straw ever saved a drowning man, but I know that a mere glance is enough to make dspair pause. For in truth, we who are creatures of impulse, are creatures of despair.

Joseph Conrad

#17. Bauer was a large, flat-topped man, with pale skin that had been acned and pitted so that it resembled a cob cleaned of corn, eyes the color of snuff, and the general expression of a natural-born straw boss.

Daniel Woodrell

#18. There is no limit to what a man can do so long as he does not care a straw who gets the credit for it.

Charles Edward Montague

#19. For want of a block, man will stumble at a straw.

Jonathan Swift

#20. 'Tis a good thing to laugh at any rate; and if a straw can tickle a man, it is an instrument of happiness.

John Dryden

#21. A thousand hills, but no birds in flight,
Ten thousand paths, with no person's tracks.
A lonely boat, a straw-hatted old man,
Fishing alone in the cold river snow.

Liu Zongyuan

#22. The scene fascinated me: a round straw hat; the funnel leaning left, the stairway leaning right; the white drawbridge, its railings made of chain; white suspenders crossed on the back of a man below; circular iron machinery; a mast that cut into the sky, completing a triangle.

Alfred Stieglitz

#23. A drowning man will clutch at a straw.

Thomas More

#24. But such is life, the silliest proverbs prove to be true, and when a man thinks, now it's all right, it's not all right by a longshot. Man proposes, God disposes, and there's always that last straw to break the camel's back.

Alfred Doblin

#25. The politician is the poorest man in the world, the most empty man, the most hollow - stuffed with straw and nothing else.

Osho

#26. For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life - namely myself.

C.S. Lewis

#27. If the defendant be a man of straw, who is to pay the costs?

Charles Dickens

#28. There was a loud burst of laughter somewhere in the campground and Maggie looked around. A man wearing a backpack but no clothes was coming down the trail. He had excellent hiking boots on his feet, a straw hat on his head and that was all. His thing was swaying in the breeze.

Robyn Carr

#29. ADMINISTRATION, n. An ingenious abstraction in politics, designed to receive the kicks and cuffs due to the premier or president. A man of straw, proof against bad-egging and dead-catting.

Ambrose Bierce

#30. A tall man, thin and pale, with high nose and teeth so white, and eyes that seem to be burning. That he be all in black, except that he have a hat of straw which suit not him or the time.

Bram Stoker

#31. You can be as great a man as you please while you're alive. Makes not a straw of difference once you go back to the mud. And

Joe Abercrombie

#32. In pleasant peace and security
How suddenly the soul in a man begins to die
He shall look up above the stalled oxen
Envying the cruel falcon,
And dig under the straw for a stone
To bruise himself on.

Robinson Jeffers

#33. Or perhaps it is because it is so NECESSARY for you to win. It is like a drowning man catching at a straw. You yourself will agree that, unless he were drowning he would not mistake a straw for the trunk of a tree.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#34. And one fine day the goddess of the wind kisses the foot of man, that mistreated, scorned foot, and from that kiss the soccer idol is born. He is born in a straw crib in a tin-roofed shack and he enters the world clinging to a ball.

Eduardo Galeano

#35. The light obtained by setting straw men on fire is not what we mean by illumination.

Adam Gopnik

#36. That man is best who sees the truth himself. Good too is he who listens to wise counsel. But who is neither wise himself nor willing to ponder wisdom is not worth a straw.

Hesiod

#37. The man in the middle was short and stocky, with swarthy skin and a black mustache that drooped almost to his chin. A colorful Mexican serape was draped across his saddle, and he wore a straw sombrero with an enormous brim.

Joe Millard

#38. The labouring man that tills the fertile soil,
And reaps the harvest fruit, hath not indeed
The gain, but pain; and if for all his toil
He gets the straw, the lord will have the seed.

Edward De Vere

#39. I turned on the pillow with a little moan, and at this juncture Jeeves entered with the vital oolong. I clutched at it like a drowning man at a straw hat.

P.G. Wodehouse