Don Feder Quotes

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.

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.

Illogical thinkers throw names and slurs around because they have no arguments with which to rebut their opponents. Rational people have to keep hammering their points home.

Bluster, sputter, question, cavil; but be sure your argument be intricate enough to confound the court.

Beware of anyone who calls you bad names merely for asking honest questions. Beware of anyone who insists on reframing your sincere curiosity as a character defect. Beware of anyone who questions your motives while ignoring your facts. When someone calls you bad names merely for asking questions, it suggests they know the answer but are terrified to admit it.

Suckers try to win arguments, nonsuckers try to win.

I've learned that sometimes when people don't like what you have to say, and don't want to debate you on ideas, it's just easier to call you a dumb blonde from Fox News.

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

You never win an argument until they attack your person.

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.

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

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

I often debate liberals on Fox News Channel who tend to start yelling and attacking when they run out of facts or common sense. I suppose these folks figure if they bow up and get in our faces, we'll just back down and see the world their way.

The more I read about the rules the great orators used, the more I realised, of course, this is how you stir people's hearts, and you persuade and cajole and move people out of fixed positions. The techniques are quite menacingly easy.

...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.

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

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.

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

Arguments, like men, are often pretenders.

When all else fails the liberals call you names or attack your personality.

Orators are most vehement when they have the weakest cause, as men get on horseback when they cannot walk.

I don't like people that try to psyche other people out.

I love the question-and-answer. I love to see liberals try to thrash their way to a coherent argument. And actually, I think it's fun to debate.