Reducing every issue to an argument can become stale but it's often a very good way of clarifying issues.
Apple chief executive Tim Cook is such a respected figure that it's easy to overlook the basic problem with his argument about encryption: Cook is asserting that a private company and the interests of its customers should prevail over the public's interest as expressed by our courts.
The argument on the other side of special rights is completely bogus. It's bogus because you could make exactly the same claim about racial or ethnic or religious minorities.
Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we're hardwired not to always think clearly when we're scared. And the country's scared.
I'm not a confrontational person in real life, so I really don't wanna get into arguments or fistfights with people I'm making fun of.
Most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do.
I tell my boys not to play rough with their younger sister. I try to teach them what I know already: You're never going to win an argument with a girl, so just let her have what she wants!
Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.
I should have known better. Pro-life arguments are now based on scientific evidence and the pro-choice arguments are not. That is a cultural, historical fact.
I'd be perfectly happy never to have to answer anything again about how I work with Ethan, or whether we have arguments, or... you know what I mean? I've been answering those questions for 20 years. I suppose it's interesting to people.
In the United States, the government is bailing out banks, intervening in the economy, yet in Latin America, the Right continues to talk about 'free markets.' It's totally outdated; they don't have arguments; they don't have any sense.
Notwithstanding these major arguments the wave theory initially did not meet with complete acceptance.
I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with a bank being big. In fact, there are some good arguments about universality of geography that in theory, if you have all your eggs in one little community, and some big employer goes out, that could be your downfall.
Similes prove nothing, but yet greatly lighten and relieve the tedium of argument.
As someone who spent a lot of years living in Jerusalem, one of the great perks is that when you come back, and you get into these Israel arguments in your American-Jewish clan, you can really just silence them by saying, 'I lived there.' So we used it like a bludgeon.
What I do know from my life is the phenomenon of saying, 'This is too small a thing to argue about', but then nevertheless finding oneself in that argument.
My argument has always been that this is not an anti-Bush film, it's a pro-democracy film. And if Bush comes out on the wrong side of democracy, that's his problem.
I dropped out of high school when I was 16, after I had a huge argument with my English teacher over the meaning of the word 'existentialism.'
The best argument for teaching poetry is to put a three-year-old or a four-year-old and read Dr. Seuss, or Robert Louis Stevenson, and to feel how the child and you are engaging in something that's really basic to the animal, which is passing on in these rhythmic ways, something that came from somewhere.
My life experience confirms that the U.S. government frequently overclassifies data. But that's a stronger argument for not dumping large volumes of government traffic on an unclassified personal server than it is a justification for retroactively challenging classification decisions.
Big Water makes an argument straight out of Economics 101. The best way to deliver water to people's homes efficiently, the water barons argue, is to put the process in the hands of the market. If water is scarce, then raise the price - let the law of supply and demand take over!
There is a definite argument to be made that videogames are becoming an art form put together by artists of different types.
I think Chinese leadership is trying to tell the world they have another set of logic or reasoning or values which are different from yours. Of course, I don't think they believe that. It's just an argument that's made when you can't confront the truth and facts. They really want to maintain power.
Unhappy, let alone angry, religious people provide more persuasive arguments for atheism and secularism than do all the arguments of atheists.
I think what I and most other sociologists of religion wrote in the 1960s about secularization was a mistake. Our underlying argument was that secularization and modernity go hand in hand. With more modernization comes more secularization.
The only part of an argument that really matters is what we think of the people arguing.
The conservative argument is that the economy is like the weather, that it just operates automatically.
I made the argument that every growing demographic in this country - nonwhite voters, younger people - is trending Democratic. It's a ticking time bomb for the GOP. That's why I felt safe in saying that 'Republicans have no hope of making serious inroads into Democratic advantages in 2010 or likely 2012 or 2014 and so on.'
But black people fall for that same argument, and they go around talking about law breakers. We did not make the laws in this country. We are neither morally nor legally confined to those laws. Those laws that keep them up, keep us down.
I like plays where people talk a lot. Conversation is sustained. Argument is sustained.
Whenever I run into prejudice. I smile and feel sorry for them, and I say to myself, There's one more argument for birth control.
My wife Mary and I have been married for forty-seven years and not once have we had an argument serious enough to consider divorce; murder, yes, but divorce, never.
Be able to defend your arguments in a rational way. Otherwise, all you have is an opinion.
And I used to assemble the family to hear because I thought that they were so good that even from the point of view of enjoyment people shouldn't miss them, and I got every word of his that I could, and I could see by hard argument there was only the one way for it.
To be considered presidential timber, there has to be a measure in the way you present your argument.
We run into some pretty tough arguments sometimes, but the idea is that at the end of the day, my wife and I realize that we'll always be holding each other's hand.
