Top 114 Refute Quotes & Sayings

The art of conversation is to be prompt without being stubborn, to refute without argument, and to clothe great matters in a motley garb.

Once you have confidence in your instincts, you must never allow other people's refusal to believe, or their data to refute, what you instinctively know is true.

Our politicians don't say anything anymore: they just refute and assert.

One can prove or refute anything at all with words. Soon people will perfect language technology to such an extent that they'll be proving with mathematical precision that twice two is seven.

After I set out to refute Christianity intellectually and couldn't, I came to the conclusion the Bible was true and Jesus Christ was God's Son.

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, "I refute it thus."

Silence is one of the hardest kind of arguments to refute. There is no good substitute for wisdom; but silence is the best that has yet been discovered.

In order to refute a conclusion, you have to put forth the best possible argument for it.

The most important factor in the training of good mental habits consists in acquiring the attitude of suspended conclusion, and in mastering the various methods of searching for new materials to corroborate or to refute the first suggestions that occur.

Peaceful New Yorkers, pls refute the Ground Zero mosque plan if you believe catastrophic pain caused @ Twin Towers site is too raw, too real.

Our belief in any particular natural law cannot have a safer basis than our unsuccessful critical attempts to refute it.

Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it.

Conservative supporters might either have the courage of their convictions or, if truly ashamed, revise them, but they should at least refute the proposition that defending your own interests is only acceptable if you're broke.

The 'harmonious world' theory .. will help dispel doubts in the international community about China's continued development and refute the absurd 'China threat theory'.

Every ethnic group has a mythology... Until 'Roots'... there was nothing in the popular culture to refute the paragraph in elementary school history class that said, 'Slaves picked the cotton, were happy and life wasn't so bad.'

People still retain the errors of their childhood, their nation, and their age, long after they have accepted the truths needed to refute them.

The biogeographic evidence for evolution is now so powerful that I have never seen a creationist book, article, or lecture that has tried to refute it. Creationists simply pretend that the evidence doesn't exist.

I do know the Bible very well from a Protestant point of view - which is what, along with my reason, entitles me to refute it. You can't rationally reject something until you know all about it.

In fact men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth - often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.

Opponents fancy they refute us when they repeat their own opinion and pay no attention to ours.

I prefer to be refuted than to refute, for it is a greater good for oneself to be freed from the greatest evil than to free another.

One of the peculiarities of recent speculation, especially in America, is that ideas are abandoned in virtue of a mere change of feeling, without any new evidence or new arguments. We do not nowadays refute our predecessors, we pleasantly bid them good-bye.

I often play a move I know how to refute.

One cannot refute what one has not thoroughly understood.

It takes one minute to tell a lie, and an hour to refute it.

He who knows only his own side of the case (argument) knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion

I also suspect that many workers in this field [molecular biology] and related fields have been strongly motivated by the desire, rarely actually expressed, to refute vitalism.

I'm quite comfortable now with being misunderstood. I don't really feel the need either to pander to it or to refute it. Just go on, and do what I've got to do.

[Art] can speak its own language only as long as the images are alive which refuse and refute the established order.

I myself have read the writings and teachings of the heretics, polluting my soul for a while with their abominable notions, though deriving this benefit: I was able to refute them for myself and loathe them even more.

There's so much denial in gymnastics. It's a beautiful sport but the other part is numbing. You become machinelike. They'll refute this, but I've been around it. I know.

If you have a very commanding argument that you cannot refute, not to accept the argument is to act irrationally.

There is no doubt our earth is warming and our seas rising - or that humankind is the cause. There is no evidence to refute this - or any genuine scientific counterargument in the climate change debate.

People can refute your facts, but never your feelings.

One truth doesn't refute another. Truth doesn't lie in the object, but in how we see it.

When words come out of politician's mouth that are linguistically incorrect, people see it reflecting their intelligence. Sarah Palin was called out for "refudiate," which seemed to combine refute and repudiate. One favourite Bushism was "misunderestimate."

Facts per se can neither prove nor refute anything. Everything is decided by the interpretation and explanation of the facts, by the ideas and the theories.

If the book be false in its facts, disprove them; if false in its reasoning, refute it. But, for God's sake, let us freely hear both sides, if we choose.

As long as [Mikhail] Saakashvili is president, I will be unable to prove my innocence in Georgia. Seen in this light, there is a positive aspect to my arrest in Germany. It will be much easier for me to refute the charges here.

I'm the kind of person who embarks on an endless leapfrog down the great moral issues. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal and rebut the refutation. Endlessly.

What I tried to do is to present the evidence that's available and that no one has been able to refute. Not even the Arab governments who own their media have been able to denigrate bin Laden as a man.

Today, it is imperative to end this hysteria, to refute the rhetoric of the Cold War and to accept the obvious fact: Russia is an independent, active participant in international affairs. Like other countries, it has its own national interests that need to be taken into account and respected.

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.

Who can refute a sneer?

Yawns are hard to refute.

Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute.

For it is the same whether you take it that the Earth is in motion or the Sky. For, in both the cases, it does not affect the Astronomical Science. It is just for the Physicist to see if it is possible to refute it.

If I had to refute all the other articles of the Jewish faith, I should be obliged to write against them as much and for as long a time as they have used for inventing their lies - that is, longer than two thousand years.

It appears, from all that precedes, reasonably certain that if there be any relative motion between the earth and the luminiferous ether, it must be small; quite small enough entirely to refute Fresnel's explanation of aberration.

Science cannot destroy the consciousness of freedom, without which there is no morality and no art, but it can refute it.

By positional play a master tries to prove and exploit true values, whereas by combinations he seeks to refute false values ... A combination produces an unexpected re-assessment of values.

I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal, and rebut the refutation.

The poem began with the title. Then I was annoyed by one of the occasional poetry-is-dead articles. Then I refute that notion.

Good books are irrefutable, and bad books refute themselves.

Philosophy may describe unreasoning, as it may describe force; it cannot hope to refute them.

We can refute assertions, but who can refute silence?

Contempt is the emotion we feel for an opponent whose arguments are too formidable to refute.

Can any of us refute the wisdom of Madison and the other framers? Can anyone look at the carnage in Iran, the bloodshed in Northern Ireland or the bombs bursting in Lebanon and yet question the dangers of injecting religious issues into the affairs of state?

Shakespeare never had six lines together without a fault. Perhaps you may find seven, but this does not refute my general assertion.

No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.