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Argument is to me the air I breathe. Given any proposition, I cannot help believing the other side and defending it.
--
"Form and Intelligibility," from The Radcliffe Manuscripts (1949); written in 1895 as an undergraduate at Radcliffe College

 

Gertrude Stein

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If you mean to make your side of the argument appear plausible, do not prejudice the people against what you think truth by your passionate manner of defending it.

 

James Burgh

 

An "Argument" is any process of thought reasonably tending to produce a definite belief. An "Argumentation" is an Argument proceeding upon definitely formulated premisses.
If God Really be, and be benign, then, in view of the generally conceded truth that religion, were it but proved, would be a good outweighing all others, we should naturally expect that there would be some Argument for His Reality that should be obvious to all minds, high and low alike, that should earnestly strive to find the truth of the matter; and further, that this Argument should present its conclusion, not as a proposition of metaphysical theology, but in a form directly applicable to the conduct of life, and full of nutrition for man's highest growth. What I shall refer to as the N.A. — the Neglected Argument — seems to me best to fulfil this condition, and I should not wonder if the majority of those whose own reflections have harvested belief in God must bless the radiance of the N.A. for that wealth. Its persuasiveness is no less than extraordinary; while it is not unknown to anybody. Nevertheless, of all those theologians (within my little range of reading) who, with commendable assiduity, scrape together all the sound reasons they can find or concoct to prove the first proposition of theology, few mention this one, and they most briefly. They probably share those current notions of logic which recognise no other Arguments than Argumentations.

 

Charles Sanders Peirce

 

This country’s split right now. I think if you’re a Republican, well, you’re wrong. I’m kidding, I’m kidding, I own like four Republicans in case three break down. But I think if you’re a Republican, that’s awesome; if you’re a Democrat, that’s awesome. I just think we need to vote. We need to vote a lot. My favorite thing to vote on are the initiatives, you know the propositions, where you’ll see an argument for one side and you’ll think thats a good point, and then you’ll see the argument for the other side, and you’ll think thats a good point too, and you don’t know which way to vote. I think we need a few that it’s just obvious which way to vote, right off the bat. Like wouldn’t it be cool if it was like proposition ninety-seven: Should we continue to not eat babies. Right there you’d be like, “Hell yeah, I don’t wanna eat babies, you know, I don’t have time, they’re not delicious, and it would be eating babies and that’s weird to me,” so there’s three reasons that I come up with to voting no. But the way they phrase those things when you get to the voting booth, you don’t know which way you’re voting, cause it’s like, “Should we not eat unbabies not on this not day” and you’re just sitting there like “F**k! I don’t wanna eat babies! You know?! I don’t have time, they’re not delicious, remember my reasons, I had like three.” So you vote no on it and then it’s on the news the next day, “Well, 74% of Americans have decided it’s time to eat babies.”

 

Kyle Cease

 

What is the argument on the other side? Only this, that no case has been found in which it has been done before. That argument does not appeal to me in the least. If we never do anything which has not been done before, we shall never get anywhere. The law will stand still whilst the rest of the world goes on; and that will be bad for both.

 

Alfred Denning

 

People go funny in the head when talking about politics. The evolutionary reasons for this are so obvious as to be worth belaboring: In the ancestral environment, politics was a matter of life and death. And sex, and wealth, and allies, and reputation... When, today, you get into an argument about whether "we" ought to raise the minimum wage, you're executing adaptations for an ancestral environment where being on the wrong side of the argument could get you killed... Politics is an extension of war by other means. Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you're on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it's like stabbing your soldiers in the back — providing aid and comfort to the enemy.

 

Eliezer Yudkowsky