For thousands of years people have been trying to force other people to think their way. Did they succeed? No. Will they succeed? No. Why? Because brute force is not an argument.
If you attempt an actual argument with a modern paper of opposite politics, you will have no answer except slanging or silence.
Or have I passed my time in pouring words like water into empty sieves, rolling a stone up a hill and then down again, trying to prove an argument in the teeth of facts, and looking for causes in the dark, and not finding them?
The man who strikes first admits that his ideas have given out.
Scientists often talk of parsimony (as in "the simplest explanation is probably correct," also known as Occam's razor), but we should not get seduced by the apparent elegance of argument from parsimony; this line of reasoning has failed in the past at least as many times as it has succeeded.
The Spirit never makes men the instruments of converting others until they feel that they cannot do it themselves; that their skill in argument, in persuasion, in management, avails nothing.
Power positions do not yield to arguments, however rationally and morally valid, but only to superior power.
I have no influence with the rising generation. All my arguments have failed to induce them to set bounds to their wants.
