Top 26 Polemics Quotes & Sayings

No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes scripture; but modern history is not a very satisfactory side-arm in political polemics; it grows less and less so.

It's tempting to engage in anti-gun polemics and hope that popular opinion will dramatically shift, but it is also likely a mistake. The smarter course for those who want stronger federal gun-control laws anytime soon is legislative stewardship and compromise.

(The terms douloi, banausoi and aristoi) are in a way more precise, but what is more vital and valuable, they are more comprehensive: they project a concept of psychic order that embraces entire fields that we have no other way of seeing all together as the working of a single principle. If we think of the human domain as the collaboration and the conflict of these three diverse character-types, we can understand the weave and the stress and polemics of their very different basal teleologies or ultimate governing purposes of life.

An important work of architecture will create polemics.

Well, I'm not involved in polemics. I never wanted to have any position of power, and I don't have it.

The polemics of right-wing radio are putting nothing less than hate onto the airwaves, into the marketplace, electing it to office, teaching it in schools, and exalting it as freedom.

The United States should not engage in tit-for-tat polemics directed at its most important allies. That is as demeaning as it is destructive.

Thinking is the subtlest form of self-polemics, the art of a certain finesse in psychological self-vivisection and self-crucifixion (Hegel of course called the path of self-disillusion the via dolorosa or "highway of despair," in Baillie's fine and florid rendering, like Jesus' route to Golgotha).

People have been modeling their lives after films for years, but the medium is somehow unsuited to moral lessons, cautionary tales or polemics of any kind.

I think the problem with polemics is that it's general and it's lazy. When you say, "This is bad," that's a general thing. We're more interested in asking the question.

I wasn't trying to write a corrective novel - that would just end up tasting like medicine, and I tried to stay away from polemics as best I could. I think that, if anything, Fobbit is my way of showing readers there's another side to war - the backstage of combat, if you will. If you play a word association game with Americans and say "war," what's the first thing that comes to mind? Soldiers running across a battlefield through a hail of bullets, right? Rambo, smoke, explosions. In Fobbit, I hope readers will see something a little different

Leading the Jewish people is not easy -- we are a divided, obstinate, highly individualistic people who have cultivated faith, sharp wittedness and polemics to a very high level.

Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.

Read with care, George Orwell's diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.

I wanted to cut past the polemics and experience London's Muslim communities for myself. My first visit was to Tower Hamlets, an East London borough that is about 38% Muslim, among the highest in the U.K. As I walked down Whitechapel Road, the adhan, or call to prayer, echoed through the neighborhood.

Nietzsche's vision of the superman is of someone who's able to control and tame his passions and turn them into something richer than raw emotion and raw feeling. I think the best writing does that too. Untamed passion basically results in bad writing or bad polemics, which so many writers and public intellectuals are vulnerable to.

I am not interested in making didactic polemical statements. That is not the way I want to make films. There is a place for polemics, but I don't think that it is in fictional cinema. Fictional cinema works subtly and deeply.

In the critics' vocabulary, the work 'precursor' is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemics or rivalry.

It is better to discuss things, to argue and engage in polemics than make perfidious plans of mutual destruction.

History is but the polemics of the victor.

When I say that George Eliot has long been my hero, I mean to include those aspects of her thought and temperament that have been disparaged or dismissed or ignored. She was, after all, a novelist who did not eschew politics or polemics - sometimes silently though defiantly, as in her relationship with George Henry Lewes.

When reason and unreason come into contact, an electrical shock occurs. This is called polemics.

In early church polemics, Jews are deemed no longer worthy of their own Scriptures because they have failed to accept Christ as the Messiah.

One parody is worth a thousand polemics.

I was sick of the way my lyrics had been extrapolated, their meanings subverted into polemics and that I had been anointed as the Big Bubba of Rebellion, High Priest of Protest, the Duke of Disobedience, Leader of the Freeloaders, Kaiser of Apostasy, Archbishop of Anarchy, the Big Cheese. Horrible titles any way you want to look at it. All code words for Outlaw.

Literary criticism now is all pranks and polemics.