I never make the mistake of arguing with people for whose opinions I have no respect.

- Edward Gibbon

Compassion will cure more sins than condemnation.

- Henry Ward Beecher

To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.

- Thomas Paine

A technical objection is the first refuge of a scoundrel.

- Heywood Broun

Most couples have not had hundreds of arguments; they've had the same argument hundreds of times.

- Gay Hendricks

Arguments are often like melodramas -- they have a predictable beginning, middle, and end.

- Gay Hendricks

One of the first things a relationship therapist learns is that couples argue to burn up energy that could be used for something else. In fact, arguments often serve the purpose of using up energy, so that the couple do not have to take the courageous, creative leap into an unknown they fear. Arguing serves the function of being a zone of familiarity into which you can retreat when you are afraid of making a creative breakthrough.

- Gay Hendricks

It is no dishonor to be in a minority in the cause of liberty and virtue.

- Sam Adams

We owe almost all our knowledge not to those who have agreed but to those who have differed.

- Charles Caleb Colton

One of the best ways of keeping your temper in an argument, as most of us know only too well, is not to listen to anything the other person has to say.

- Alice Miller

When I tell the truth, it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those that do.

- William Blake

When I'm getting ready to reason with a man, I spend one-third of my time thinking about myself and what I am going to say -- and two-thirds thinking about him and what he is going to say.

- Abraham Lincoln

Nor knowest thou what argument
Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent.
All are needed by each one;
Nothing is fair or good alone.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Put the argument into a concrete shape, into an image, some hard phrase, round and solid as a ball, which they can see and handle and carry home with them, and the cause is half won.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Fear not those who argue but those who dodge.

- Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

There's nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view that I hold dear.

- Daniel Dennett



Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win. On Being a Teacher

- Jonathan Kozol



Arguments over grammar and style are often as fierce as those over IBM versus Mac, and as fruitless as Coke versus Pepsi and boxers versus briefs.

- Jack Lynch



Whenever two good people argue over principles, they are both right.

- Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach



My dear sir, they don't debate. Each of them merely issues an ultimatum, and in what a tone! It all goes to show what extraordinary people they are, each more unequivocal than the other. - "The Old Lady and the Bear"

- Colette



Life is a quest and love a quarrel ...

- Edna St. Vincent Millay



When an arguer argues dispassionately he thinks only of the argument.

- Virginia Woolf



To repeat what others have said, requires education, to challenge it,
requires brains.

- Mary Pettibone Poole



Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.

- Leonardo da Vinci



Truth springs from argument amongst friends.

- David Hume



Argument is the worst sort of conversation.

- Jonathan Swift