William Wycherley Quotes

When they can't win a debate (can they ever?), leftists deploy what the late novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand called the argument from intimidation. Instead of trying to refute the other side, they label their opponents' position evil, attribute sinister motives to its adherents, and charge that its proponents are encouraging violence.

A man who is furnished with arguments from the mint will convince his antagonist much sooner than one who draws them from reason and philosophy.

A disputant no more cares for the truth than the sportsman for the hare.

To pull off successful attacks in debates, you have to execute with nuance and subtlety. It has to be artful.

Any good trial lawyer knows that if you've got one credible expert or scientific study, then you can let the jury decide.

I consider myself sort of like a pseudo lawyer. Like, I'm convinced I can solve every case and argue my way.

I'm a fan of robust debate, and I'm not averse to engaging in the odd ad hominem attack myself.

Good lawyers win so-so lawsuits. Great lawyers can win lawsuits in which you have little or no chance to win.

Sophistry, like poison, is at once detected and nauseated, when presented to us in a concentrated form; but a fallacy which, when stated barely in a few sentences, would not deceive a child, may deceive half the world, if diluted in a quarto volume.

...associational ad hominem attacks remain the left's favorite rhetorical strategy for undermining opponents.

Rhetoric is useful because the true and the just are naturally superior to their opposites, so that, if decisions are improperly made, they must owe their defeat to their own advocates; which is reprehensible. Further, in dealing with certain persons, even if we possessed the most accurate scientific knowledge, we should not find it easy to persuade them by the employment of such knowledge. For scientific discourse is concerned with instruction, but in the case of such persons instruction is impossible.

If you can somehow force a liberal into a point-counterpoint argument, his retorts will bear no relation to what you’ve said - unless you were in fact talking about your looks, your age, your weight, your personal obsessions, or whether you are a fascist. In the famous liberal two-step, they leap from one idiotic point to the next, so you can never nail them. It’s like arguing with someone with Attention Deficit Disorder.

Those who, in debate, appeal to their qualifications, argue from memory, not from understanding.

Arguments, like men, are often pretenders.

Lawyers spend their professional careers shoveling smoke.

There is no such thing as a convincing argument, although every man thinks he has one.

I never saw an instance of one or two disputants convincing the other by argument.

So you see how endlessly futile and fruitless it would be if we wanted to refute their objections every time they obstinately resolved not to think through what they say but merely to speak, just so long as they contradict our arguments in any way they can.

Rhetoric in serious discourses is like the flowers in corn; pleasing to those who come only for amusement, but prejudicial to him who would reap profit from it.

It's so much easier to debate people when you can pretend that they hold moronic position that they don't actually believe.

The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.

Affect not little shifts and subterfuges to avoid the force of an argument.

You never win an argument until they attack your person.

I used to be a conservative and I watch these debates and I'm wondering, I don't think I've changed, but it's a little troubling sometimes when people are appealing to people's fears and emotion rather than trying to get them to look over the horizon for a broader perspective and that's kind of where we are.

If you were making poetry out of convictions - trying to convince other people - you were in the territory of rhetoric, and that wasn't the territory of poetry. I think that's pretty smart. I think that it doesn't need to be altogether true, but that was my starting place.