Quotes & Sayings About Polemics

...a copy of his Ninty-five Theses, a formal declaration of his arguments against indulgences. This is the document that Luther is said to have nailed to the church door in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517. If it happened at all, it was not quite as dramatic as it sounds - this was not an uncommon way to distribute pamphlets and polemics, and the Theses, written in Latin, would not have been accessible to most of the lay townspeople. But the timing - on the eve of All Saints' Day - made the challenge auspicious, and the document was soon thereafter distributed in a German translation by a local printer. — Philip Ball

The New Testament was not written by historians with the critical spirit of a Thucydides or a Polybius, but by men moved by the fervor of faith. Under these circumstances, it is understandable that it contains discrepancies, some non historical legends, and polemics. — Marvin Perry

One parody is worth a thousand polemics ... — Jennifer Stone

I wasn't trying to write a corrective novel - that would just end up tasting like medicine, and I tried to stay away from polemics as best I could. I think that, if anything, Fobbit is my way of showing readers there's another side to war - the backstage of combat, if you will. If you play a word association game with Americans and say "war," what's the first thing that comes to mind? Soldiers running across a battlefield through a hail of bullets, right? Rambo, smoke, explosions. In Fobbit, I hope readers will see something a little different — Dave Abrams

An important work of architecture will create polemics. — Richard Meier

You can't please everyone, especially if you're doing very radical things at the vanguard of cooking. That's life; it's a polemic I've lived with since I started cooking. — Ferran Adria

Again and again the old groupings of left and right no longer seem helpful. Sloganeering and dogmatizing settle nothing, nor do emotional tirades and protests really help us sort things through in a thoughtful, biblical fashion. — Arthur F. Holmes

In early church polemics, Jews are deemed no longer worthy of their own Scriptures because they have failed to accept Christ as the Messiah. — Jack Schwartz

But the fact is, again and again in my lifetime, the vicious vituperations, the polemics, the dialectics, the sophistries of politics have become vapour and mist, while what remains is the literature and the art, which at the time might have been merely tolerated by the politicos. — Doris Lessing

In the critics' vocabulary, the work 'precursor' is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemics or rivalry. — Jorge Luis Borges

Well, I'm not involved in polemics. I never wanted to have any position of power, and I don't have it. — Kaija Saariaho

Moreover, we have seen enough by now to know that technological changes in our modes of communication are even more ideology-laden than changes in our modes of transportation. Introduce the alphabet to a culture and you change its cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community, history and religion. Introduce the printing press with movable type, and you do the same. Introduce speed-of-light transmission of images and you make a cultural revolution. Without a vote. Without polemics. Without guerrilla resistance. Here is ideology, pure if not serene. Here is ideology without words, and all the more powerful for their absence. All that is required to make it stick is a population that devoutly believes in the inevitability of progress. And in this sense, all Americans are Marxists, for we believe nothing if not that history is moving us toward some preordained paradise and that technology is the force behind that movement. — Neil Postman

(The terms douloi, banausoi and aristoi) are in a way more precise, but what is more vital and valuable, they are more comprehensive: they project a concept of psychic order that embraces entire fields that we have no other way of seeing all together as the working of a single principle. If we think of the human domain as the collaboration and the conflict of these three diverse character-types, we can understand the weave and the stress and polemics of their very different basal teleologies or ultimate governing purposes of life. — Kenny Smith

When I say that George Eliot has long been my hero, I mean to include those aspects of her thought and temperament that have been disparaged or dismissed or ignored. She was, after all, a novelist who did not eschew politics or polemics - sometimes silently though defiantly, as in her relationship with George Henry Lewes. — Cynthia Ozick

Nietzsche's vision of the superman is of someone who's able to control and tame his passions and turn them into something richer than raw emotion and raw feeling. I think the best writing does that too. Untamed passion basically results in bad writing or bad polemics, which so many writers and public intellectuals are vulnerable to. — Pankaj Mishra

It is a horrible thing to have to enter into the details
of inter-party polemics; it is like diving into a cesspool. — George Orwell

Without the Ermen & Engels mill in Salford, owned by Friedrich Engels's textile-manufacturing father, the chronically impoverished Marx might well have not survived to pen polemics against textile manufacturers. Something — Terry Eagleton

Monster is a compassionate picture without any obvious agenda. And it's effective precisely because it's not a polemic. — Stephanie Zacharek

People have been modeling their lives after films for years, but the medium is somehow unsuited to moral lessons, cautionary tales or polemics of any kind. — Renata Adler

It is better to discuss things, to argue and engage in polemics than make perfidious plans of mutual destruction. — Mikhail Gorbachev

I was sick of the way my lyrics had been extrapolated, their meanings subverted into polemics and that I had been anointed as the Big Bubba of Rebellion, High Priest of Protest, the Duke of Disobedience, Leader of the Freeloaders, Kaiser of Apostasy, Archbishop of Anarchy, the Big Cheese. Horrible titles any way you want to look at it. All code words for Outlaw. — Bob Dylan

Thinking is the subtlest form of self-polemics, the art of a certain finesse in psychological self-vivisection and self-crucifixion (Hegel of course called the path of self-disillusion the via dolorosa or "highway of despair," in Baillie's fine and florid rendering, like Jesus' route to Golgotha). — Kenny Smith

Literary criticism now is all pranks and polemics. — Mason Cooley

Leading the Jewish people is not easy
we are a divided, obstinate, highly individualistic people who have cultivated faith, sharp wittedness and polemics to a very high level. — Shimon Peres

Read with care, George Orwell's diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics. — Christopher Hitchens

Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby. — Walter Benjamin

There is hardly any political question in the United States that sooner or later does not turn into a judicial question. From that, the obligation that the parties find in their daily polemics to borrow ideas and language from the judicial system. Since most public men are or have formerly been jurists, they make the habits and the turn of ideas that belong to jurists pass into the handling of public affairs. The jury ends up by familiarizing all classes with them. Thus, judicial language becomes, in a way, the common language; so the spirit of the jurist, born inside the schools and courtrooms, spreads little by little beyond their confines; it infiltrates all of society, so to speak; it descends to the lowest ranks, and the entire people finishes by acquiring a part of the habits and tastes of the magistrate. — Alexis De Tocqueville

History is but the polemics of the victor. — William F. Buckley Jr.

Aggressiveness, complaints, pressures, drama and polemics can wipe out a favor or a promise and stain a generous deed. — Angelica Hopes

When reason and unreason come into contact, an electrical shock occurs. This is called polemics. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

The polemics of right-wing radio are putting nothing less than hate onto the airwaves, into the marketplace, electing it to office, teaching it in schools, and exalting it as freedom. — Patricia J. Williams

There's always a polemic in my clothes. — Vivienne Westwood

Even the most sacred things are not to be honored before the Devil has had his say against them. But since the evil advocate is always able to think of further objections, absolute certainty can never be achieved. He is also allowed to go to extremes, to make use of polemics, mockery or slander. A sentimental plea for tolerance and decorum is merely an attempt to protect one's own cowardice. — Wolfgang Sofsky

I am not interested in making didactic polemical statements. That is not the way I want to make films. There is a place for polemics, but I don't think that it is in fictional cinema. Fictional cinema works subtly and deeply. — Sally Potter

I think the problem with polemics is that it's general and it's lazy. When you say, "This is bad," that's a general thing. We're more interested in asking the question. — Tony Goldwyn