A Quote by Frederick Douglass

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed.

Frederick Douglass

Quote Topics

Time Argument Convincing Irony Like Needed Scorching

Quote Author

Frederick Douglass
American - Author
February 14, 1818 - February 20, 1895

What I like about music is its ability to be convincing, to carry an argument through successfully to the finish, though the terms of the argument remain unknown quantities.

John Ashbery

It's a powerful instrument, dynamite -- nothing like it for a convincing argument!

Leonid Andreyev

I think that as poets, we can get away with stuff because we can ride on the melt of metaphor. We cover a lot of terrain psychically and temporally and linguistically via metaphor, and that can be a stand-in for an argument, whereas in prose, you have to make the argument, and you have to be convincing because the sequence must make sense in time and purpose.

David Biespiel

The notion that somehow or another they'll (Iran) put it in a picnic basket and hand it to some terrorist group is merely an argument that may be convincing to some people who don't know anything about nuclear weapons. I don't find that argument very credible, I'm not sure that people who make it even believe in it. But it's a good argument to make if you have no other argument to make. The fact of the matter is, Iran has been around for 3000 years, and that is not a symptom of a suicidal instinct.

Zbigniew Brzezinski

The goal of a definition is to introduce a mathematical object. The goal of a theorem is to state some of its properties, or interrelations between various objects. The goal of a proof is to make such a statement convincing by presenting a reasoning subdivided into small steps each of which is justified as an "elementary" convincing argument.

Yuri Manin

Never [enter] into dispute or argument with another. I never yet saw an instance of one of two disputants convincing the other by argument. I have seen many on their getting warm, becoming rude and shooting one another.

Thomas Jefferson

Any work of science, no matter what its point of departure, cannot become fully convincing until it crosses the boundary between the theoretical and the experimental: Experimentation must give way to argument, and argument must have recourse to experimentation.

Gaston Bachelard

Convincing yourself doesn't win an argument.

Robert Half

Neither irony or sarcasm is argument.

Samuel Butler

I don't like the word ironic. I like the word absurdity, and I don't really understand the word 'irony' too much. The irony comes when you try to verbalize the absurd. When irony happens without words, it's much more exalted.

David Lynch

There is no such thing as a convincing argument, although every man thinks he has one.

E. W. Howe

Neither irony nor sarcasm is argument.

Rufus Choate

No argument, no matter how convincing, will give courage to a coward

Aesop

I never saw an instance of one or two disputants convincing the other by argument.

Thomas Jefferson

I like illusion when it is so convincing that we might as well see reality this way - I like to present to our belief system something that is convincing, that 'we know not to be.'