Profoundly inspirational argument quotes will challenge the way you think, change the way you live and transform your whole life.
Famous Argument Quotes
A. A. Milne: The third rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. A second rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. A first rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.
The definition of a Racist is anybody winning an argument with a liberal.
Adrienne Rich: Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work
When someone disrespects you, beware the impulse to win their respect. For disrespect is not a valuation of your worth but a signal of their character Brendon Burchard
Albert Einstein: The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.
I argue very well. Ask any of my remaining friends. I can win an argument on any topic, against any opponent. People know this, and steer clear of me at parties. Often, as a sign of their great respect, they don’t even invite me. Dave Barry
Anaïs Nin: When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.
Every time you find some humor in a difficult situation, you win.
Anatole France: An education isn’t how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It’s being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don’t.
People know this, and steer clear of me at parties. Often, as a sign of their great respect, they don’t even invite me. Dave Barry
Aristotle: It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Most of it’s just whining, but every so often there’ll be something I can use later: a joke, a description, a quote. It’s an invaluable aid when it comes to winning arguments. ‘That’s not what you said on February 3, 1996,’ I’ll say to someone. David Sedaris
Bell Hooks: Critical thinking requires us to use our imagination, seeing things from perspectives other than our own and envisioning the likely consequences of our position.
We need a new apologetic, geared to the needs of today, which keeps in mind that our task is not to win arguments but to win souls Such an apologetic will need to breathe a spirit of humanity, that humility and compassion which understand the anxieties and questions of people.
Bertrand Russell: The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holder’s lack of rational conviction.
There is a battle of two wolves inside us all. One is evil. It is anger, jealousy, greed, resentment, lies, inferiority and ego. The other is good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, humility, kindness, empathy and truth. The wolf that wins? The one you feed.
Carol Wade: People can be extremely intelligent, have taken a critical thinking course, and know logic inside and out. Yet they may just become clever debaters, not critical thinkers, because they are unwilling to look at their own biases.
Most people who serve in Washington have been trained either as lawyers or as political operatives professions that tend to place a premium on winning arguments rather than solving problems. Barack Obama
Christopher Hitchens: The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.
The purpose of apologetics is not just to win an argument or a discussion, but that people with whom we are in contact may become Christians and then live under the Lordship of Christ in the whole spectrum of life. Francis Schaeffer
Confucius: Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous.
Every time you are able to find some humor in a difficult situation, you win.
Daniel Levitin: Critical thinking is not something you do once with an issue and then drop it. It requires that we update our knowledge as new information comes in.
Wrote a science fiction novel about a man who wins an argument with his wife, but it was rejected for being too far fetched. Dana Gould
Desmond Tutu: My father used to say, ‘Don’t raise your voice, improve your argument.
I try to teach them what I know already: You’re never going to win an argument with a girl, so just let her have what she wants! Steve Harvey
Duke Ellington: A problem is a chance for you to do your best.
Mr. Mellon wants to cut the surtax on the rich, and leave it as is on the poor, as there is more poor than rich. I suppose the majority will win. Will Rogers
Elon Musk: I think it’s important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is by analogy. With analogy we are doing this because it is like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. With first principles you boil things down to the most fundamental truths and then reason up from there.
Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form. Rumi
Howard Zinn: We all have an enormous responsibility to bring to the attention of others information they do not have, which has the potential of causing them to rethink long held ideas.
If carried to its ultimate conclusions, the old idea of an eye for an eye eventually ends in making everybody blind. Sterling W Sill
James Baldwin: The paradox of education is precisely this that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change.
You can’t win an argument. You can’t because if you lose it, you lose it; and if you win it, you lose it. Dale Carnegie
Jean Piaget: The principal goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive, and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept, everything they are offered.
If Clinton somehow pulls out a win in both states, then she has an excellent argument to make to the superdelegates: Voters still respond to fear. Obama’s campaign has been based on the implicit argument that voters no longer respond to fear. If Clinton wins both states, that probably proves Obama wrong on that point. Cynthia Tucker
John Dewey: Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us with observation and memory. It instigates invention. It shocks us out of sheep like passivity, and sets us at noting and contriving conflict is a sine qua non of reflection and ingenuity.
The difference between winning and losing is most often not qiuting. Walt Disney
Jonathan Haidt: We should not expect individuals to produce good, open minded, truth seeking reasoning, particularly when self interest or reputational concerns are in play. But if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system. This is why it’s so important to have intellectual and ideological diversity within any group or institution whose goal is to find truth such as an intelligence agency or a community of scientists or to produce good public policy such as a legislature or advisory board
Winning or losing an argument, receiving an acceptance or rejection, is no proof of the validity or value of personal identity. One may be wrong, mistaken, or a poor craftsman, or just ignorant but this is no indication of the true worth of one’s total human identity: past, present and future! Sylvia Plath
J. William Fulbright: We must dare to think about ‘unthinkable things’ because when things become unthinkable, thinking stops and action becomes mindless
To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children to leave the world a better place to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded Ralph Waldo Emerson
Lawrence Balter: You want to prepare your child to think as they get older. You want them to be critical in their judgments. Teaching a child, by your example, that there’s never any room for negotiating or making choices in life may suggest that you expect blind obedience, but it won’t help them, in the long run, to be discriminating in choices and thinking.
I don’t like your tone, was Violet’s standard answer when one of her children was winning an argument. Julia Quinn
Leo Tolstoy: Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for critical thinking.
The best way I know of to win an argument is to start by being in the right. Lord Quintin Hogg Hailsham
Marie Curie: Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.
I explain this not for publicity, nor seeking to win an argument of right or wrong, I explain so that the record is clear as to my thinking and motivations in bombing a government installation. Timothy McVeigh
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: To think incisively and to think for one’s self is very difficult. We are prone to let our mental life become invaded by legions of half-truths, prejudices, and propaganda. At this point, I often wonder whether or not education is fulfilling its purpose. A great majority of the so called educated people do not think logically and scientifically. Even the press, the classroom, the platform, and the pulpit in many instances do not give us objective and unbiased truths. To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction. The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically.
Don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion. Muhammad Ali
Mason Cooley: The critical spirit never knows when to stop meddling.
The best way I know of to win an argument is to start by being in the right. Lord Hailsham
Max Beerbohm: The one real goal of education is to leave a person asking questions.
Courage is the discovery that you may not win, and trying when you know you can lose. Tom Krause
Naomi Wolf: Obstacles, of course, are developmentally necessary: they teach kids strategy, patience, critical thinking, resilience, and resourcefulness.
Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other side is mostly not listening, than with telling the guys on your side how they ought to sound when they’re arguing. Adam Gopnik
Noam Chomsky: I try to encourage people to think for themselves, to question standard assumptions Don’t take assumptions for granted. Begin by taking a skeptical attitude toward anything that is conventional wisdom. Make it justify itself. It usually can’t. Be willing to ask questions about what is taken for granted. Try to think things through for yourself.
Success is falling nine times and getting up ten. Jon Bon Jovi
Oliver Wendell Holmes: A mind stretched by new ideas never goes back to its original dimensions.
A man sometimes wins an argument, but a woman always wins a silence. Robert Breault
Ralph Waldo Emerson: Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path, and leave a trail.
If you admit that to silence your opponent by force is to win an intellectual argument, then you admit the right to silence people by force. Hans Eysenck
Randi Weingarten: Standardized testing is at cross purposes with many of the most important purposes of public education. It doesn’t measure big picture learning, critical thinking, perseverance, problem solving, creativity, or curiosity; yet, those are the qualities great teaching brings out in a student.
There’s no winning arguments with your parents, so why get all pumped up over them? It is way better to dive down and get out of the way than it is to get clobbered by some parental tidal wave. Wendelin Van Draanen
Richard Dawkins: Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.
Arguments are delimited by whitespace characters, which are either spaces or tabs.
Richard Feynman: We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.
Backslashes are interpreted literally, unless they immediately precede a double quote mark.
Robert Grudin: To act vulgarly we must be ignorant not only of other people but of ourselves, not only of the nature of our action but of its ramifications in the world at large. To act vulgarly, we must indulge our own ignorance in large, mutually supportive groups. By vulgarity, I mean a comprehensive cultural laxity that spawns monstrosities and is fed by a corporate system that has abandoned long term development in favor of quarterly profits, by media whose moral standards are based on viewer share, and by a system of higher education that has sold out its image of the humanities and critical thinking as the main bases for consciousness and values.
Behind every argument is someone’s ignorance. Louis Brandeis
Sadhguru: When your mind is full of assumptions, conclusions, and beliefs, it has no penetration, it just repeats past impressions.
Arguments are to be avoided; they are always vulgar and often convincing. Oscar Wilde
Stanley Kubrick: If chess has any relationship to film making, it would be in the way it helps you develop patience and discipline in choosing between alternatives at a time when an impulsive decision seems very attractive.
Most quarrels amplify a misunderstanding. Andre Gide
Steve Jobs:Simple can be harder than complex: you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.
It takes two to quarrel, but only one to end it. Spanish Proverb
Terry Heick: Critical thinking is certainly a skill but when possessed as a mindset a playful and humble willingness it shifts from a labor to an art. It asks, Is this true? By what standard?
Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause. Victor Hugo
Thomas J. Watson, Sr Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Expose your ideas to the danger of controversy. Speak your mind and fear less the label of crackpot than the stigma of conformity.
It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them. Pierre De Beaumarchais
Sir William Bragg: The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.
Fear not those who argue but those who dodge. Marie Ebner Eschenbach
William James: A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
