Argument Quotes - Page 39

• Seems fairly clear that you fix a breed by LIMITING the amount of alien infiltration. You make a race by homogeneity and by avoiding INbreeding.... No argument has ever been sprouted against it. You like it in dogs and horses.

  Ezra Pound

  Dog, Horse, Race

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• It has often been argued that absolute scepticism is self-contradictory; but this is a mistake: and even if it were not so, it would be no argument against the absolute sceptic, inasmuch as he does not admit that no contradictory propositions are true. Indeed, it would be impossible to move such a man, for his scepticism consists in considering every argument and never deciding upon its validity; he would, therefore, act in this way in reference to the arguments brought against him.

  Charles Sanders Peirce

  Mistake, Moving, Men

  Charles Sanders Peirce, Nathan Houser, Christian J.W. J. W. Kloesel (1992). “The Essential Peirce, Volume 1: Selected Philosophical Writings? (1867–1893)”, p.56, Indiana University Press

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• Coming out, all the way out, is offered more and more as the political solution to our oppression. The argument goes that, if people could see just how many of us there are, some in very important places, the negative stereotype would vanish overnight. ...It is far more realistic to suppose that, if the tenth of the population that is gay became visible tomorrow, the panic of the majority of people would inspire repressive legislation of a sort that would shock even the pessimists among us.

  Jane Rule

  Gay, People, Political

  Jane Rule (2013). “Outlander: Short Stories and Essays”, p.247, Open Road Media

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• A man needs no arguments to make him discern and approve what is beautiful: it strikes at first sight, and attracts without a reason. And as this beauty is found in the shape and form of corporeal things, so also is there analogous to it a beauty of another kind, an order, a symmetry, and comeliness in the moral world. And as the eye perceiveth the one, so the mind doth by a certain interior sense perceive the other, which sense, talent, or faculty, is ever quickest and purest in the noblest minds.

  George Berkeley

  Beauty, Beautiful, Eye

  George Berkeley (1752). “Alciphron: Or, The Minute Philosopher. In Seven Dialogues Containing an Apology for the Christian Religion Against Those who are Called Free-thinkers”, p.112

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• All that stock of arguments [the skeptics] produce to depreciate our faculties, and make mankind appear ignorant and low, are drawn principally from this head, to wit, that we are under an invincible blindness as to the true and real nature of things.

  George Berkeley

  Real, Ignorant, Faculty

  George Berkeley (1982). “A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge ...”, p.62, Hackett Publishing

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• The modern concept of separation is an argument for a total separation of religion from the state. The consequence of the acceptance of the doctrine leads to the removal of religion as an influence in civil government.

  Francis Schaeffer

  Christian, Religious, Acceptance

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• A lot of arguments happen among religious and non religious people about the question of who's going to hell and who's going to heaven and uh, a lot of times Christians get into this argument by saying 'we have the only way to heaven.' And uh, people often ask me what do I think is the way to heaven. I have a problem when they ask me this question because it assumes that the primary purpose of Jesus' coming and the primary message of Jesus was a message about how to get to heaven.

  Brian D. McLaren

  Christian, Religious, Jesus

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• Johnson is wise, Boswell foolish; Johnson warns and abstains, Boswell plunges; Johnson is rather a great man writing than a greatwriter, Boswell is a great writer and an ordinary man; and they are two of a kind, abysmal melancholics and compulsive socializers, afraid of solitude and afraid of death and dissolution, victims of themselves, meant for each other, needing each other, needing evidence and arguments (Boswell is a lawyer, Johnson magisterially dictates to him some of his briefs), making beautiful models of rational discourse out of the useful substance of all they know.

  Marvin Mudrick

  Friendship, Beautiful, Wise

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• Your views are now my own.

  Marvin L. Cohen

  Views, My Own

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• What corporations fear most are consumers who ask questions. Naomi Klein offers us the arguments with which to take on the superbrands.

  Billy Bragg

  Corporations, Consumers, Offers

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• He who knows only his own side of the case (argument) knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion

  John Stuart Mill

  Opposites, Doe, May

  John Stuart Mill (1989). “J. S. Mill: 'On Liberty' and Other Writings”, p.38, Cambridge University Press

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• When our brain feels too weak to deal with our opponent's objections, our heart answers by casting suspicion on their underlying motives.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Heart, Brain, Answers

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• The one conclusive argument that has at all times discouraged people from drinking a poison is not that it kills but rather that it tastes bad.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Drinking, People, Poison

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• Most people see no reason to stop arguing just because an issue has been decided.

  Mason Cooley

  Issues, People, Arguing

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• The finding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance is not philosophy, but special pleading

  Bertrand Russell

  Philosophy, Special, Pleading

  Bertrand Russell (2004). “History of Western Philosophy”, p.427, Routledge

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• Never invite to dinner: those who won't decide until the last minute; those who come more than half an hour late; those who want to bring along two or three friends; drunks; monologists; those who stay until three o'clock in the morning; those who think that conversation means having an argument; those who take a high moral tone; those who are stupid, ugly, or dull. Enforcement of these rules will enable one to eat alone every night in comfort.

  Mason Cooley

  Morning, Stupid, Mean

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• The form of religion was always a trivial matter to me. ... The pageantry of the Roman Church that first mothered and nurtured me touches me to this day. I love the Protestant prayers of the English Church. And I love the stern and knotty argument, the sermon with heads and sequences, of the New England Congregationalist. For this catholicity Catholics have upbraided me, churchmen rebuked me, and dissenters denied that I had any religion at all.

  Mary Catherwood

  Prayer, Catholic, Church

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• I know that with consecration on the part of believers, separation from the world, disentanglement from enslaving sins, and a mighty baptism of the Holy Spirit, the church would become a conquering power in the world, not by its constructed theology, not by its Sabbath services, not by its arguments to convince the intellect, but by its simple story of Jesus' love, by the Cross, the Cross--God's hammer, God's fire.

  Abbott Eliot Kittredge

  Jesus, Simple, Fire

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• Truth is congenial to man. Moral truth is then most consummate when, like beauty, it commends itself without argument. The righteous not only does right, but loves to do right.

  Francis William Newman

  Truth, Men, Doe

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• Give me the facts, and I will twist them the way I want, to suit my argument.

  Winston Churchill

  Giving, Suits, Facts

  To an Oxford historian assisting him during the 1930s on a biography of the first Duke of Marlborough; quoted in Stafford, Churchill and Secret Service (1998).

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• We recognize the force of the argument that the effects of war under modern conditions may be felt in the economy for years and years, and that if the war power can be used in days of peace to treat all the wounds which war inflicts on our society, it may not only swallow up all other powers of Congress but largely obliterate the Ninth and the Tenth Amendments as well.

  William O. Douglas

  War, Power, Years

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• Particularly when the war power is invoked to do things to the liberties of people, or to their property or economy that only indirectly affect conduct of the war and do not relate to the engagement of the war itself, the constitutional basis should be scrutinized with care. ... I would not be willing to hold that war powers may be indefinitely prolonged merely by keeping legally alive a state of war that had in fact ended. I cannot accept the argument that war powers last as long as the effects and consequences of war for if so they are permanent -- as permanent as the war debts.

  Robert H. Jackson

  War, Power, Long

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• Arguments do not erase prejudice any more than arguments erase scars, whether psychological or physical.

  Gerry Spence

  Prejudice, Scar, Psychological

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• 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

  Silence, Kind, Substitutes

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• [F]riends praise your abilities to the skies, submit to you in argument, and seem to have the greatest deference for you; but, though they may ask it, you never find them following your advice upon their own affairs; nor allowing you to manage your own.

  William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne

  Sky, Advice, May

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