Robert G. Ingersoll Quotes

Use your logick, and then your rhetorick. Rhetorick without logick, is like a tree with leaves and blossoms, but no root; yet I confess more are taken with rhetorick than logick, because they are catched with a free expression, when they understand not reason. Logick must be natural, or it is worth nothing at all: Your rhetorick figures may be learned.

Because an appeal makes logical sense is no guarantee that it will work.

Rhetoric is the counterpart of logic; since both are conversant with subjects of such a nature as it is the business of all to have a certain knowledge of, and which belong to no distinct science. Wherefore all men in some way participate of both; since all, to a certain extent, attempt, as well to sift, as to maintain an argument; as well to defend themselves, as to impeach.

When you get me a good man made out of arguments, I will get you a good dinner with reading you the cookery book.

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

That's the beauty of argument, if you argue correctly, you're never wrong.

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.

It would be awesome to be so impressive that we could sway people to our way of thinking just by declaiming our thoughts, but probably most of us lack such gravitas. Luckily, there's something even better: evidence, logic, and argument.

Convincing yourself doesn't win an argument.

Neither irony or sarcasm is argument.

Good argument is intended to persuade another.

It is true the orator may make a myriad replica of his own passion out of those who listen to him. But that does not prove he is right or they are not fools.

A philosopher once said, 'Half of good philosophy is good grammar.'

Persuasion is clearly a sort of demonstration, since we are most fully persuaded when we consider a thing to have been demonstrated.

Rhetoric is cheap, evidence comes more dearly.

Logic is neither a science nor an art, but a dodge.

Rhetoric and dialectics can't change what I have learned from observation and experience.

Logic is the technique by which we add conviction to truth.

A statement is persuasive and credible either because it is directly self-evident or because it appears to be proved from other statements that are so.

The duty of rhetoric is to deal with such matters as we deliberate upon without arts or systems to guide us, in the hearing of persons who cannot take in at a glance a complicated argument or follow a long chain of reasoning.

Though we cannot out-vote them we will out-argue them.

Neither irony nor sarcasm is argument.

I always thought Jon Stewart was an extremely good surgeon with his scalpel. He would have Republicans on who, I guess, were unclear about what Stewart was up to, and while Jon Stewart was being nice, he was building a case for drowning them.

I enjoy a good reasoned argument. I love the power of logic.

SYLLOGISM, n. A logical formula consisting of a major and a minor assumption and an inconsequent.