Top 100 Refute Quotes
#1. I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal, and rebut the refutation.
Tom Stoppard
#2. Let there be an end to thought. Thus do I refute Descartes.' I sprawled, not a cogito or a sum to my name.
Roger Zelazny
#3. No one can be compared with you and so no one can refute this
Sunday Adelaja
#4. It makes you feel better," my father said. "Hmmm?" I asked, lost in what passed for thought. "Forgiveness." I found I could not refute it.
Gary Amdahl
#5. As for the assertion that nuclear weapons prevent wars, how many more wars are needed to refute this arguments? Tens of millions have died in the many wars that have taken place since 1945.
Joseph Rotblat
#6. I do not refute ideals, I merely put on gloves when I deal with them ...
Friedrich Nietzsche
#7. We know the truth not only through our reason but also through our heart. It is through the latter that we know first principles, and reason, which has nothing to do with it, tries in vain to refute them.
Blaise Pascal
#8. A story went around that someone had asked Mozart how he intended to refute his detractors.
"I will refute them with new works," he said.
It was a confident, valiant thing for him to say, everyone thought. I thought so too, when I invented the story; and I still believe it today. (172)
Joan Wickersham
#9. I prefer to be refuted than to refute, for it is a greater good for oneself to be freed from the greatest evil than to free another.
Socrates
#10. An incorrect theory, even if it cannot be inhibited by any contradiction that would refute it, is none the less incorrect, just as a criminal policy is none the less criminal even if it cannot be inhibited by any court that would curb it.
L. E. J. Brouwer
#11. The biogeographic evidence for evolution is now so powerful that I have never seen a creationist book, article, or lecture that has tried to refute it. Creationists simply pretend that the evidence doesn't exist. Ironically,
Jerry A. Coyne
#12. So you see how endlessly futile and fruitless it would be if we wanted to refute their objections every time they obstinately resolved not to think through what they say but merely to speak, just so long as they contradict our arguments in any way they can.
Augustine Of Hippo
#13. [Art] can speak its own language only as long as the images are alive which refuse and refute the established order.
Herbert Marcuse
#14. It appears, from all that precedes, reasonably certain that if there be any relative motion between the earth and the luminiferous ether, it must be small; quite small enough entirely to refute Fresnel's explanation of aberration.
Albert A. Michelson
#15. One of the peculiarities of recent speculation, especially in America, is that ideas are abandoned in virtue of a mere change of feeling, without any new evidence or new arguments. We do not nowadays refute our predecessors, we pleasantly bid them good-bye.
George Santayana
#16. One cannot refute what one has not thoroughly understood.
Leo Strauss
#18. Once you have confidence in your instincts, you must never allow other people's refusal to believe, or their data to refute, what you instinctively know is true.
T.D. Jakes
#19. The word 'yes' is just a sound. It's nothing without context. It can signal the end of a life, an exultation after a scored basket or a vanquished foe; it can answer questions or refute them; it's an affirmation.
Josh Hanagarne
#20. In the struggle against that state of affairs criticism is no passion of the head, it is the head of passion. It is not a lancet, it is a weapon. Its object is its enemy, which it wants not to refute but to exterminate.
Christopher Hitchens
#22. Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute.
Josh Billings
#23. Our belief in any particular natural law cannot have a safer basis than our unsuccessful critical attempts to refute it.
Karl Popper
#24. One can prove or refute anything at all with words. Soon people will perfect language technology to such an extent that they'll beproving with mathematical precision that twice two is seven.
Anton Chekhov
#25. Today, it is imperative to end this hysteria, to refute the rhetoric of the Cold War and to accept the obvious fact: Russia is an independent, active participant in international affairs. Like other countries, it has its own national interests that need to be taken into account and respected.
Vladimir Putin
#26. The critique of the highest values hitherto does not simply refute them or declare them invalid. It is rather a matter of displaying their origins as impositions which must affirm precisely what ought to be negated by the values established.
Martin Heidegger
#27. Silence is one of the hardest kind of arguments to refute. There is no good substitute for wisdom; but silence is the best that has yet been discovered.
Josh Billings
#28. I also suspect that many workers in this field [molecular biology] and related fields have been strongly motivated by the desire, rarely actually expressed, to refute vitalism.
Francis Crick
#29. Except two breeds - the stupid and the narrowly feline - all women have a touch of the Lesbian: an assertion all good non-analytic creatures refute with horror, but quite true: there is always the poignant intensive personal taste, the flair of inner-sex, in the tenderest friendships of women.
Mary MacLane
#30. Can any of us refute the wisdom of Madison and the other framers? Can anyone look at the carnage in Iran, the bloodshed in Northern Ireland or the bombs bursting in Lebanon and yet question the dangers of injecting religious issues into the affairs of state?
Barry Goldwater
#31. Now, as I expect you know, there is nothing more cruel than talk, and there is nothing more difficult to combat. When people say things behind your back there is nothing you can refute or deny, and the rumours go on growing and growing, and no one can stop them. I
Agatha Christie
#32. It was useless to argue, she thought, and to wonder about people who would neither refute an argument nor accept it.
Ayn Rand
#33. The 'harmonious world' theory .. will help dispel doubts in the international community about China's continued development and refute the absurd 'China threat theory'.
Ye Xiaowen
#34. Ignorance of the law excuses no man; not that all men know the law, but because 'tis an excuse every man will plead, and no man can tell how to refute him.
John Selden
#35. As long as [Mikhail] Saakashvili is president, I will be unable to prove my innocence in Georgia. Seen in this light, there is a positive aspect to my arrest in Germany. It will be much easier for me to refute the charges here.
Irakli Okruashvili
#36. I would rather a boy learnt in the roughest school the courage to hit a politician, or gained in the hardest school the learning to refute him - rather than that he should gain in the most enlightened school the cunning to copy him.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#37. I have become lost to the world
In which I otherwise wasted so much time
It means nothing to me
Whether the world believes me dead
I can hardly say anything to refute it
For truly, I am no longer a part of the world.
Hanya Yanagihara
#38. Pain shared is pain lessened; joy shared is joy increased. Thus do we refute entropy.
Spider Robinson
#39. Put bluntly, the American church today accepts grace in theory but denies it in practice. We say we believe that the fundamental structure of reality is grace, not works - but our lives refute our faith.
Brennan Manning
#40. Good books are irrefutable, and bad books refute themselves.
Remy De Gourmont
#41. They were arguing about something very complex and important, and neither of them could refute the other. They did not agree with each other in anything, and that made their argument especially interesting and endless.
Mikhail Bulgakov
#42. Every one has the right to refute any opinion. But no one has the right to prevent its expression.
Periyar E.V. Ramasamy
#43. Science cannot destroy the consciousness of freedom, without which there is no morality and no art, but it can refute it.
Isaiah Berlin
#44. Facts per se can neither prove nor refute anything. Everything is decided by the interpretation and explanation of the facts, by the ideas and the theories.
Ludwig Von Mises
#45. A real advantage to gettin' old is that the older ou get, the fewer people there are left alive who can refute anything you say!
Clark Crouch
#46. Old Lowji's nasty remark would haunt Farrokh forever: "Immigrants are immigrants all their lives!" Once someone makes such a negative pronouncement, you might refute it but you never forget it; some ideas are so vividly planted, they become visible objects, actual things.
John Irving
#47. To command their professors of astronomy to refute their own observations is to command them not to see what they do see and not to understand what they do understand.
Galileo Galilei
#49. If I had to refute all the other articles of the Jewish faith, I should be obliged to write against them as much and for as long a time as they have used for inventing their lies- that is, longer than two thousand years.
Martin Luther
#51. It is hardly useful if you trustingly play through variation after variation from a book. It is a great deal more useful and more interesting if you take part actively in the analysis, find something yourself, and try to refute some of the author's conclusions.
Mark Dvoretsky
#52. The dead are mute, but the living still have voice with which to protest their innocence. Often their objections are noisy and pious, impossible to refute since the person who could condemn them has been silenced forever.
Sue Grafton
#53. The scientist who would rather refute than comprehend demonstrates he has chosen the wrong calling.
Mark Clifton
#54. The one place Gods inarguably exist is in our minds where they are real beyond refute, in all their grandeur and monstrosity.
Alan Moore
#55. If the book be false in its facts, disprove them; if false in its reasoning, refute it. But, for God's sake, let us freely hear both sides, if we choose.
Thomas Jefferson
#56. After I set out to refute Christianity intellectually and couldn't, I came to the conclusion the Bible was true and Jesus Christ was God's Son.
Josh McDowell
#57. It reveals to me the causes of many natural phenomena that are entirely incomprehensible in the light of the generally accepted hypotheses. To refute the latter I collected many proofs, but I do not publish them ... I would dare to publish my speculations if there were people men like you.
Galileo Galilei
#58. In Hebrew, satan means an advocate of the alternative, the one who makes the arguments you don't know how to refute." Michelangelo looked to the old Jew, still grinning wickedly in the corner. "That satan is my best friend.
Adam Gidwitz
#59. Suppose ... the body is a God in its own right, a teacher, a mentor, a certified guide? Then what? ... Are we strong enough to refute the party line and listen deep, listen true to the body as a powerful and holy being?
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
#60. I'm afraid there is evidence to refute this claim of human uniqueness. Cetaceans are one example that are known to share experiences.
John Pappas
#61. It takes one minute to tell a lie, and an hour to refute it.
Noam Chomsky
#62. Well, fuck, Brandt whispered. All that rational thinking had to be thrown out the window. This was why he liked irrational thinking so much better. It took less effort and the conclusions you came to were harder to refute.
Abigail Roux
#63. It would have been absurd in the Evangelist to say that the Speech was always with God, if he had not some kind of subsistence peculiar to himself in God. This passage serves, therefore, to refute the error of Sabellius; for it shows that the Son is distinct from the Father.
John Calvin
#64. I do not refute ideals, I just out on gloves when I deal with them ...
Friedrich Nietzsche
#65. Contempt is the emotion we feel for an opponent whose arguments are too formidable to refute.
Ann Coulter
#66. Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it.
Karl Popper
#67. (I)n order to refute a conclusion, you have to put forth the best possible argument for it. (p. 158)
Rebecca Goldstein
#68. For it is the same whether you take it that the Earth is in motion or the Sky. For, in both the cases, it does not affect the Astronomical Science. It is just for the Physicist to see if it is possible to refute it.
Abu Rayhan Al-Biruni
#69. I opened my mouth-and had nothing to refute that with. Damn people who argued using logic. Talk about unfair.
Jeaniene Frost
#70. It is a disappointment to me to spawn a child who feels so deeply. I would like to refute the idea that to feel somehow makes you a better person.
Deborah Levy
#71. You can easily see what and endless, wearisome and fruitless task it would be if I were to refute all the unconsidered objections of people who pigheadly contradict everything I say.
Augustine Of Hippo
#72. The poem began with the title. Then I was annoyed by one of the occasional poetry-is-dead articles. Then I refute that notion.
Thomas Lux
#74. We can call the attempt to refute theism by displaying the continuity of belief in God with primitive delusions the method of Anthropological intimidation.
Edwyn Bevan
#75. Our politicians don't say anything anymore: they just refute and assert.
Beeban Kidron
#76. If you have a very commanding argument that you cannot refute, not to accept the argument is to act irrationally.
Robert F. Almeder
#77. That we're both right. One truth doesn't refute another. Truth doesn't lie in the object, but in how we see it. Hadrian
Michael J. Sullivan
#78. I myself have read the writings and teachings of the heretics, polluting my soul for a while with their abominable notions, though deriving this benefit: I was able to refute them for myself and loathe them even more.
Eusebius
#79. The most important factor in the training of good mental habits consists in acquiring the attitude of suspended conclusion, and in mastering the various methods of searching for new materials to corroborate or to refute the first suggestions that occur.
John Dewey
#80. Philosophy may describe unreasoning, as it may describe force; it cannot hope to refute them.
George Santayana
#82. One cannot refute Christianity; one cannot refute a disease of the eye.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#83. They who have just ideas, and express them in suitable language, would need to use no long discourse to refute the errors of empty conjecture.
Augustine Of Hippo
#84. I'm the kind of person who embarks on an endless leapfrog down the great moral issues. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal and rebut the refutation. Endlessly.
Tom Stoppard
#85. no weapon that is fashioned against you shall succeed, and you shall refute every tongue that rises against you in judgment. This is the heritage of the servants of the LORD c and their vindication [5] from me, declares the LORD.
Anonymous
#86. Properly measured, the average actively managed dollar must underperform the average passively managed dollar, net of costs. Empirical analyses that appear to refute this principle are guilty of improper measurement.
William Forsyth Sharpe
#87. The art of conversation is to be prompt without being stubborn, to refute without argument, and to clothe great matters in a motley garb.
Benjamin Disraeli
#88. The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.
Alberto Brandolini
#89. There's so much denial in gymnastics. It's a beautiful sport but the other part is numbing. You become machinelike. They'll refute this, but I've been around it. I know.
Cathy Rigby
#90. Silence is an arguement hard to refute
Anonymous
#92. I refute a god who would do such a thing to test people who have done their best to live according to his laws.
Ann Aguirre
#93. What I tried to do is to present the evidence that's available and that no one has been able to refute. Not even the Arab governments who own their media have been able to denigrate bin Laden as a man.
Michael Scheuer
#94. All that rational thinking had to be thrown out the window. This was why he liked irrational thinking so much better. It took less effort and the conclusions you came to were harder to refute.
- Brandt
Abigail Roux
#95. Shared pain is lessened.
Shared joy is increased.
Thus we refute entropy.
Spider Robinson
#96. His job on TV was to explain science to the general public and, as such, to act as a lightning for people who could not accept all the things that science implied about their worldview and their way of life, and who showed a kind of harebrained ingenuity in finding ways to refute it.
Neal Stephenson
#97. Because you're you and I'm me, that's why." "Well, there's an argument I can't refute." I can just see his luscious smile.
Magda Alexander
#98. If you only know your own side of a case, then your belief is likely to be inadequate. You need to be able to refute counter-arguments to your position otherwise you aren't justified in your belief even if it happens to be true.
Nigel Warburton
#99. There is nothing more cruel than talk, and there is nothing more difficult to combat. When people say things behind your back there is nothing you can refute or deny, and the rumours go on growing and growing, and no one can stop them.
Agatha Christie
#100. That we are both right. One truth doesn't refute another. Truth doesn't lie in the object, but in how we see it.
Michael Sullivan
