There can be no progress without head-on confrontation.

Naturally, I always place my word over anyone else’s simply because I know why I said what I said.

It wasn’t an attack. We’d been together too many times before, made love together too many times before, for it to be that. It was just that fear had suddenly entered, and made us dangerous...

He searched for words to poison the shaft of his disdain.

Well, there was a sort of bastard justice in his view of the case, and so I dropped the matter. When you can’t cure a disaster by argument, what is the use to argue?

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

I’m a politician. I’m not going to get into a whole range of scientific argument with scientists.

‘Fat bitch,’ Kessa murmured as the door scraped closed behind Mrs. Stone. ‘She meant well, Francesca. And you see, everyone thinks you’re too thin.’ ‘Since when is Mrs. Stone an authority on appearance. I’ve heard...

Forgive me, madam,” he said lightly, amused, “but waiting to make love to you again is straining my nerves.” She scoffed but she was quite shaken; he could see it in her expression, in the...

I’M SCOTTISH!

Don’t fight with narrow minded people; be determined to compel them to change their mindsets about who you stand to be, not by arguments, but by focusing on what you do every day. If they...

When you lay down a proposition which is forthwith controverted, it is of course optional with you to take up the cudgels in its defence. If you are deeply convinced of its truth, you will...

When you raise the most valid of points, you will be grazed by the most hollow of souls, and the most vacant of personages.

I don’t like your tone,” was Violet’s standard answer when one of her children was winning an argument.

Your opponent’s wrong doesn’t automatically make you right. Most fights aren’t about who’s right; they are contention over degrees of wrongness.

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

Every discussion with a girl is an argument, and when you think you are right suddenly you realize that your trapped.

When two men of science disagree, they do not invoke the secular arm; they wait for further evidence to decide the issue, because, as men of science, they know that neither is infallible. But when...

But Curtis had come to the table with something they’d never expected, something they would have thought outmoded and out-lived in the modern age: a kind of fundamental righteousness that only the fundamental possessed. Unfettered...

I want to be strapped to a table, while a family of chickens argues over who gets to eat my legs.

I am a cuddly atheist… I am against creationism being taught in schools because there is empirical evidence that it is a silly notion… I am passionately concerned about the rise in pseudo-science; in beliefs...

Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker’s game because they almost always turn out to be—or to be indistinguishable from—self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.

I really do not know, Socrates, how to express what I mean. For somehow or other our arguments, on whatever ground we rest them, seem to turn round and walk away from us.

…I am not, however, militant in my atheism. The great English theoretical physicist Paul Dirac is a militant atheist. I suppose he is interested in arguing about the existence of God. I am not. It...

The best way to win an argument is to begin by being right