Argument Theories Quotes & Sayings

It was among the ruins of the capitol that I first conceived the idea of a work which has amused and exercised nearly twenty years of my life. — Edward Gibbon

The social function of economic science consists precisely in developing sound
economic theories and in exploding the fallacies of vicious reasoning. In the pursuit of
this task the economist incurs the deadly enmity of all mountebanks and charlatans
whose shortcuts to an earthly paradise he debunks. The less these quacks are able to
advance plausible objections to an economist's argument, the more furiously do they
insult them. — Ludwig Von Mises

The minute you hear a sermon on materialism, you're glad somebody else is there to hear it. — Paul David Tripp

It now transpired that the man in front of her didn't actually have a ticket at all, and the argument then began to range freely and angrily over such topics as the physical appearance of the airline check-in girl, her qualities as a person, theories about her ancestors, speculations as to what surprises the future might have in store for her and the airline for which she worked, and finally lit by chance on the happy subject of the man's credit card. He didn't have one. — Douglas Adams

Both European and American historians have done away with any conceptual limits on what in the past needs and deserves investigating. The result, among other things, has been a flood of works on gender history, black history, and ethnic history of all kinds. — Edmund Morgan

My letters are for when I don't want to be in love anymore. They're for good-bye. Because after I write in my letter, I'm not longer consumed by my all-consuming love ... My letters set me free. Or at least they're supposed to. — Jenny Han

The question as to which of these two theories applies to the actual world is, like all questions concerning the actual world, in itself irrelevant to pure mathematics.* But the argument against absolute position usually takes the form of maintaining that a space composed of points is logically inadmissible, and hence issues are raised which a philosophy of mathematics must discuss. In what follows, I am concerned only with the question: Is a space composed of points self-contradictory? It is true that, if this question be answered in the negative, the sole ground for denying that such a space exists in the actual world is removed; but this is a further point, which, being irrelevant to our subject, will be left entirely to the sagacity of the reader. — Bertrand Russell

Scientific literacy is a rather noble ideal. Achieving it, however, is problematic thanks to our tribal brains. If science is equated with knowledge, then communicating facts, figures, and theories should be a way to increase the public's level of engagement with it. However, this boils down to the authority distributing the information. Who do you listen to when there are conflicting sources? Our brain's desire for certainty and its tendency to evaluate new information based on social clues means anybody painted as an expert, who sounds confident, shares our values and flatters our expectations, is more likely to win over our opinion...regardless of the scientific merits of their argument. — Mike McRae

Last month I was banging on about how books were better than anything - -how just about any decent book you picked would beat up anything else, any film or painting or piece of music, you cared to match it up with. Anyway, like most theories advanced in this column, it turned out to be utter rubbish. I went to a couple of terrific exhibitions at the Royal Academy (and that's a hole in my argument right there - one book might beat up one painting, but what chance has one book, or even four books, got against the collected works of Guston and Vuillard?) ... — Nick Hornby

Look, I want to say,
The worst thing you can imagine has already
Zipped up its coat and is heading back
Up the road to wherever it came from. — Tracy K. Smith

Alberta's two largest cities collected more in library fines than two higher levels of government levied against polluters in 2006-2007. — Gordon Laird

Jonathan Seagull discovered that boredom and fear and anger are the reasons that a gull's life is so short, and with those gone from his thought, he lived a long fine life indeed. — Richard Bach

He's kind with me."
"But not with everyone." This wasn't a question. It was a statement of fact.
"No, not with everyone. But if you knew -"
"And you've fallen in love with a person who doesn't feel it's necessary to be kind to anyone else but you?"
I pressed my lips together and swallowed. She didn't sound judgmental or even upset. She sounded curious. It was always this way with my mother. Her curiosity was why she won every argument, and why people always listened to her and took her advice.
She was exceedingly reasonable. She was never malicious or pushy, never condescending or irritated. She was only curious. She'd poke holes in terrible proposals and theories with her curious questions until it was clear to everyone that the proposal or theory was garbage. But she'd never, ever come out and say it.
I'd learned that the best defense against curiosity is honestly. — Penny Reid

The word of the Lord never comes to us as an opinion, no attempt is made to support it by argument, it comes as a definite, abstract statement of fact. So it is from the first words ... to the last, the works of the Father are declared as facts, not theories. — Anthony W. Ivins

"science" as defined in our culture has a philosophical bias that needs to be exposed. On the one hand, science is empirical. This means that scientists rely on experiments, observations and calculations to develop theories and test them. On the other hand, contemporary science is naturalistic and materialistic in philosophy. What this means is that materialist explanations for all phenomena are assumed to exist. And what that means is that the NABT's definition of evolution as an unsupervised process is simply true by definition
regardless of the evidence! It is a waste of time to argue about the evidence if one side has already won the argument by defining the terms. — Phillip E. Johnson

Some psychologists and philosophers are distrustful of the concept of self. They argue against it because they do not like separating man from the continuum with animals, and they believe the concept of the self gets in the way of scientific experimentation. But rejecting the concept of "self" as "unscientific" because it cannot be reduced to mathematical equations is roughly the same as the argument two and three decades ago that Freud's theories and the concept of "unconscious" motivation were "unscientific." It is a defensive and dogmatic science - and therefore not true science - which uses a particular scientific method as a Procrustean bed and rejects all forms of human experience which don't fit. — Rollo May

Truth does not need argument, agreement, theories or beliefs. There is only one test for it and that is to ask yourself 'Is the statement true or false in my experience?. — Barry Long

Science is based on the possibility of objectivity, on the possibility of different people checking out for themselves the observations made by others. Without that possibility, there is no empirical principle capable of deciding between different arguments and theories. — Jose Padilha

Because pessimism needs to counter that argument in order to be at all persuasive, a recurring theme in pessimistic theories throughout history has been that an exceptionally dangerous moment is imminent. — David Deutsch

Above all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

One salutary development in recent ethical theorizing is the widespread recognition that no short argument will serve to eliminate any of the major metaethical positions. Such theories have to weave together views in semantics, epistemology, moral psychology and metaphysics. The comprehensive, holistic character of much recent theorizing suggests the futility of fastening on just a single sort of argument to refute a developed version of realism or antirealism. No one any longer thinks that ethical naturalism can be undermined in a single stroke by the open question argument, or that appeal to the descriptive semantics of moral discourse is sufficient to refute noncognitivism. — Russ Shafer-Landau