Robert G. Ingersoll Quotes

Don't raise your voice, improve your argument.

My father always used to say, "Don't raise your voice. Improve your argument."

If the reason I give is a good one, you will act upon it. If it is a bad one I cannot make it better by piling epithet upon epithet. There is no logic in abuse; there is no argument in an epithet.

Logic, a discipline invented by Aristotle, teaches that every positive claim is equivalent to a negation, and every negation to a positive claim. Affirming truth and denying falsehood are the same act. But reporting the news and making people feel disgust for your political opponents are not.

The design of Rhetoric is to remove those Prejudices that lie in the way of Truth, to Reduce the Passions to the Government of Reasons; to place our Subject in a Right Light, and excite our Hearers to a due consideration of it.

Skillful conversationalists can explore disagreements and make points in ways that feel constructive and positive rather than combative or corrective.

For, if a good speaker, never so eloquent, does not see into the fact, and is not speaking the truth of that - is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?

Be calm in arguing; for fierceness makes error a fault, and truth discourtesy.

My father would never have said about any of his children you shouldn't express your opinions. But it's the way in which you express them. And for me to do - to speak at demonstrations and be as strident as I was now I see wasn't right. And it - there was a better way to do it. I could have written articles.

Moral teaching should always be used as a gift and not a cudgel.... It is important that we all be able to share our moral viewpoints without hurting each other. That is what is wrong with political discourse today.

I don't think politics has gotten too negative. I ... believe in going after the opposition on the issues.

Use your logick, and then your rhetorick. Rhetorick without logick, is like a tree with leaves and blossoms, but no root; yet I confess more are taken with rhetorick than logick, because they are catched with a free expression, when they understand not reason. Logick must be natural, or it is worth nothing at all: Your rhetorick figures may be learned.

Drawing forceful distinctions and being civil are not mutually exclusive.

Dad knew how to disagree without being disagreeable or rude.

If there's intelligence behind an opinion, then I'm all for expressing it, but I would never just start a fight with someone for the sake of it - that's just not me.

If you let things devolve into a shouting match, then it's really difficult to have a discussion, a serious discussion.

There is a way to disagree with someone, but it doesn't have to be threatening.

Since when was an emotional argument won by logic?

Facts are not truths; they are not conclusions; they are not even premises, but in the nature and parts of premises.

Additional problems are the offspring of poor decisions. When inquiry and advocacy are combined, the goal is no longer 'to win the argument', but to find the best argument.

There is no learned man but will confess be hath much profited by reading controversies,--his senses awakened, his judgment sharpened, and the truth which he holds firmly established. If then it be profitable for him to read, why should it not at least be tolerable and free for his adversary to write? In logic they teach that contraries laid together, more evidently appear; it follows then, that all controversy being permitted, falsehood will appear more false, and truth the more true; which must needs conduce much to the general confirmation of an implicit truth.

In the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is palpable.

So long as the priest, that professional negator, slanderer and poisoner of life, is regarded as a superior type of human being, there cannot be any answer to the question: What is Truth?

Logic is the art of convincing us some truth.

We can't expect to solve problems if all we do is tear each other down. You can disagree with a certain policy without demonizing the person who espouses it.