Debate

Sourced

• Argument is to me the air I breathe. Given any proposition, I cannot help believing the other side and defending it.
  • Gertrude Stein
  • First written as an undergraduate at Radcliffe College (1895); "The Radcliffe Manuscripts", Form and Intelligibility (1949)

• Ignorantia non est argumentum.
  • Translation: Ignorance is no argument.
  • Baruch Spinoza, Ethica ordine geometrico demonstrata et in quinque parses distincta, Part 1, Addendum; Amsterdam, 1677.
  • Originally used to oppose traditional theological views that everything exists and is determined by divine intervention because no other plausible reason or explanation is seen.

Unsourced

• It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle it without debate.
  • Joseph Joubert

• Argument, as usually managed, is the worst sort of conversation, as in books it is generally the worst sort of reading.
  • Jonathan Swift

• Behind every argument is someone's ignorance.
  • Louis Brandeis

• The best way I know of to win an argument is to start by being in the right.
  • Quintin Hogg, Baron Hailsham of St Marylebone

• Debate is the death of conversation.
  • Emil Ludwig

• He who establishes his argument by noise and command shows that his reason is weak.
  • Michel de Montaigne

• A long dispute means both parties are wrong.
  • Voltaire

• Never contend with one that is foolish, proud, positive, testy, or with a superior, or a clown, in matter of argument.
  • Thomas Fuller

• People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.
  • Gilbert K. Chesterton

• The purely agitational attitude is not good enough for a detailed consideration of a subject.
  • Jawaharlal Nehru

• Weak arguments are often thrust before my path; but although they are most unsubstantial, it is not easy to destroy them. There is not a more difficult feat known than to cut through a cushion with a sword.
  • Richard Whately

• When much dispute has past, We find our tenets just the same as last.
  • Alexander Pope