Argument Quotes - page 44
Further, I have powerful enemies in academe, esp. in the US, and they will gladly exploit any slander they expect to get away with, in this case slander invested with Harvard authoritativeness. They have no scruples about using allegations that they know to be lies if these lies can do the job of harming. If I don't contradict these lies, they will use that as an extra argument in their innuendo, "and Dr. Elst has never even denied it!”.
Koenraad Elst
Now, can one die every day to everything that one knows - except, of course, the technological knowledge, the direction where your home is, and so on; that is, to end, psychologically, every day, so that the mind remains fresh, young and innocent? That is death. And to come upon that there must be no shadow of fear. To give up without argument, without any resistance. That is dying. Have you ever tried it? To give up without a murmur, without restraint, without resistance, the thing that gives you most pleasure (the things that are painful, of course, one wants to give up in any case). Actually to let go. Try it. Then, if you do it, you will see that the mind becomes extraordinarily alert, alive and sensitive, free and unburdened. Old age then takes on quite a different meaning, not something to be dreaded.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
We grasp at the straw of progress (a desiccated ideological twig) because we are still not ready for the Darwinian revolution. We crave progress as our best hope for retaining human arrogance in an evolutionary world. Only in these terms can I understand why you such a poorly formulated and improbable argument maintains such a powerful hold over us today.
Stephen Jay Gould
We live in a capitalist economy, and I have no particular objection to honorable self-interest. We cannot hope to make the needed, drastic improvement in primary and secondary education without a dramatic restructuring of salaries. In my opinion, you cannot pay a good teacher enough money to recompense the value of talent applied to the education of young children. I teach an hour or two a day to tolerably well-behaved near-adults-and I come home exhausted. By what possible argument are my services worth more in salary than those of a secondary-school teacher with six classes a day, little prestige, less support, massive problems of discipline, and a fundamental role in shaping minds. (In comparison, I only tinker with intellects already largely formed.)
Stephen Jay Gould
Southern intellectuals also invoked economic and political arguments in support of slavery. They pointed to the dreadful situation of the ‘free laborers' in the North and throughout Europe, and the exploitative nature of industrial capitalism. The slave owner felt a moral obligation toward the slave and had an economic stake in his continues welfare, since the slave was valuable property... As far as the right of every slave to be a free laborer, they mocked this argument as the right to be ‘free to beg, steal and starve.'
Alan Dershowitz
"When all men have made themselves equal, we shall be forced to unite."
"And there'll no longer be appalling things done in the face of heaven by thirty million men who don't wish them."
It is true, and there is nothing to reply to it. What pretended argument or shadow of an answer dare one oppose to it - "There'll no longer be the things done in the face of heaven by thirty millions of men who don't want to do them!"
Such is the logic that I hear and follow of the words, spoken by these pitiful fellows cast upon the field of affliction, the words which spring from their bruises and pains, the words which bleed from them.
Now, the sky is all overcast. Low down it is armored in steely blue by great clouds. Above, in a weakly luminous silvering, it is crossed by enormous sweepings of wet mist. The weather is worsening, and more rain on the way. The end of the tempest and the long trouble is not yet.
Henri Barbusse
There is a strong moral case for strict border controls and severe limits on immigration. A country is the only unit in which it is possible for people to be effectively unselfish to their neighbours. Without its shared culture and loyalty, there can be no shared law, no shared willingness to pay taxes or accept authority, no free nation capable of protecting its own people from danger within and without, and of sheltering those fleeing from oppression elsewhere. This argument often goes unsaid because of the semi-official ideological censorship now operating in most Western countries, which is called political correctness and which smears all dissenting views, usually as 'racist'. It is important that those genuinely concerned with freedom and with the defence of civilisation armour themselves against this foolish attempt to suppress free debate, and perhaps reconsider positions taken more because they are modish than because they are defensible with truth and reason.
Peter Hitchens
At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation's ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.
Frederick Douglass
A free culture has been our past, but it will only be our future if we change the path we are on right now. Like Stallman's arguments for free software, an argument for free culture stumbles on a confusion that is hard to avoid, and even harder to understand. A free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists don't get paid. A culture without property, or in which creators can't get paid, is anarchy, not freedom. Anarchy is not what I advance here. Instead, the free culture that I defend in this book is a balance between anarchy and control. A free culture, like a free market, is filled with property. It is filled with rules of property and contract that get enforced by the state. But just as a free market is perverted if its property becomes feudal, so too can a free culture be queered by extremism in the property rights that define it. That is what I fear about our culture today. It is against that extremism that this book is written.
Lawrence Lessig
In summary, then, the set theoretic 'needs' of physics are surprisingly similar to the set theoretic needs of pure logic. Both disciplines need some set theory to function at all. Both disciplines can 'live' - but live badly - on the meager diet of only predicative sets. Both can live extremely happily on the rich diet of impredicative sets. Insofar, then, as the indispensability of quantification over sets is any argument for their existence - and we will discuss why it is in the next section - we may say that it is a strong argument for the existence of at least predicative sets, and a pretty strong, but not as strong, argument for the existence of impredicative sets.
Hilary Putnam
If reason is both transcendent and immanent, then philosophy, as culture-bound reflection and argument about eternal questions, is both in time and eternity. We don't have an Archimedean point; we always speak the language of a time and place; but the rightness and wrongness of what we say is not just for a time and a place.
Hilary Putnam
It is clear, from his complete dependence on abuse, innuendo, misleading statements and lies in his "review article”, that Witzel has no logical argument to offer against my theory, analysis and conclusions. .... Far from launching a crusade against 19th century colonialism (Witzel's review article is a typical specimen of how a crusading article sounds), I in fact point out at some length why I cannot subscribe to any view which holds the 19th century "colonial” scholars more than superficially guilty for the AIT or its present-day ramifications.
Shrikant Talageri
The computer, with its multiplying forums for spontaneous free expression from e-mail to listservs and blogs, has increased facility and fluency of language but degraded sensitivity to the individual word and reduced respect for organized argument, the process of deductive reasoning. The jump and jitter of us commercial television have demonstrably reduced attention span in the young.
Camille Paglia
The murder of one person is called unrighteous and incurs one death penalty. Following this argument, the murder of ten persons will be ten times as unrighteous and there should be ten death penalties; the murder of a hundred persons will be a hundred times as unrighteous and there should be a hundred death penalties. All the gentlemen of the world know that they should condemn these things, calling them unrighteous. But when it comes to the great unrighteousness of attacking states, they do not know that they should condemn it. On the contrary, they applaud it, calling it righteous.
Mozi
Angell argued that in a modern economy no economic benefit could be generated even by successful wars of conquest... Angell's argument showed, beyond reasonable doubt, that war and territorial expansion are not, in general sensible policies. His views have often been derided on the basis that they were falsified by the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, which was pursued to the bitter end even though it destroyed the global market economy that had formed the backdrop to his analysis. But in reality the outcome proved him right. Of course, Germany, the power most influenced by the arguments of Clausewitz and his successors, reaped nothing but grief from the war. But the attempts of the victorious allies to exact reparations, extend their colonial influence and so on were also entirely futile, exactly as Angell had predicted.
Norman Angell
The main casualty of this transformation in the foundations of society has been the theory and practice of liberalism, of the old liberal democracy and the old liberal nationalism. The fundamental tenet of a liberal. creed was the belief in the power of individual reason and in the reasonableness of man. Rational discussion and argument, the interchange of individual opinions, was the sure way to find the answer to any problem; and, since men were reasonable, difficulties could always be solved by compromise, not by fighting it out. Nationalism, in the liberal creed, meant the rational desire of men of the same race and kind for freedom to live together and run their affairs in common; those who enjoyed this freedom themselves would naturally respect it in others.
E. H. Carr
Now a philosopher exploring the difficult terrain of right and wrong should not be over-impressed by the argument "a child would know the difference". But when, let us say, we are being persuaded that it is ethical to put someone in prison for reading or writing the wrong books, it is well to be reminded that you can persuade a man to believe almost anything provided he is clever enough, but it is much more difficult to persuade someone less clever.
Tom Stoppard
