M. Stanton Evans Quotes

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

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

Convincing yourself doesn't win an argument.

In every debate, whatever the format, whatever the questions, there is one and only one way to identify the winner: Who commands the room? Who drives the narrative? Who is in charge?

Anything can go wrong in a debate, and Obama is not a perfect debater.

He who frames the question wins the debate.

I am bound to furnish my antagonists with arguments, but not with comprehension.

Fear not those who argue but those who dodge.

Suckers try to win arguments, nonsuckers try to win.

History is the art of making an argument about the past by telling a story accountable to evidence. In the writing of history, a story without an argument fades into antiquarianism; an argument without a story risks pedantry. Writing history requires empathy, inquiry, and debate. It requires forswearing condescension, cant, and nostalgia. The past isn’t quaint. Much of it, in fact, is bleak.

The skilful disputant well knows that he never has his enemy at more advantage than when, by allowing the premises, he shows him arguing wrong from his own principles.

Whenever people are being intellectually dishonest in debate, it is an implicit concession they have lost the fight

There is no learned man but will confess be hath much profited by reading controversies,--his senses awakened, his judgment sharpened, and the truth which he holds firmly established. If then it be profitable for him to read, why should it not at least be tolerable and free for his adversary to write? In logic they teach that contraries laid together, more evidently appear; it follows then, that all controversy being permitted, falsehood will appear more false, and truth the more true; which must needs conduce much to the general confirmation of an implicit truth.

Whoever in debate quotes authority uses not intellect, but memory.

Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other side is mostly not listening, than with telling the guys on your side how they ought to sound when they’re arguing.

I know no better way of waging the battle for Truth than arraying the facts face to face on either side and letting them fight it out.

John Kerry says that he wants to debate President Bush once a month until the election. This could be a risky move for Senator Kerry. If Bush doesn't show up for the debates, John Kerry may end up debating an empty chair. And that could be pretty much a toss up as to which one has the better personality.

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

When you write an essay, of course you're going to get pushback, but you're going to be allowed to make your case at leisure. You're going to be allowed to take into account possible objections and to fully humanize your reader. That feels to me like a much more sane thing to do.

First you win the argument, then you win the vote.

I ceased in the year 1764 to believe that one can convince one’s opponents with arguments printed in books. It is not to do that, therefore, that I have taken up my pen, but merely so as to annoy them, and to bestow strength and courage on those on our own side, and to make it known to the others that they have not convinced us.

The late William Jennings Bryan, L.L.D., always had one great advantage in controversy; he was never burdened with an understanding of his opponent's case.

An isolated person requires correspondence as a means of seeing his ideas as others see them, and thus guarding against the dogmatisms and extravagances of solitary and uncorrected speculation. No man can learn to reason and appraise from a mere perusal of the writing of others. If he live not in the world, where he can observe the public at first hand and be directed toward solid reality by the force of conversation and spoken debate, then he must sharpen his discrimination and regulate his perceptive balance by an equivalent exchange of ideas in epistolary form.

This writer, who is horribly perspicacious and vigorous, demonstrates the certainty of a great European war, and regards it with the peculiar satisfaction excited by such things in a certain order of mind. His phrases about "dire calamity" and so on mean nothing; the whole tenor of his writing proves that he represents, and consciously, one of the forces which go to bring war about; his part in the business is a fluent irresponsibility, which casts scorn on all who reluct at the "inevitable." Persistent prophecy is a familiar way of assuring the event.

Eloquence wins its great and enduring fame quite as much from the benches of our opponents as from those of our friends.