“You can measure the happiness of a marriage by the number of scars that each partner carries on their tongues, earned from years of biting back angry words.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

“If you can't win by reason, go for volume.”
― Bill Watterson

“You can't win an argument. You can't because if you lose it, you lose it; and if you win it, you lose it.”
― Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends & Influence People

“A wise man doesn’t answer a multifaceted question with a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ response alone. A one-word reply for an issue is a kindergarten response that has no value or meaning. Two people could basically feel the same way about an issue but still argue about it and possibly even come to hate each other because they settled on different one-word answers.”
― Jasun Ether, The Beasts of Success

“Arguments are to be avoided, they are always vulgar and often convincing.”
― Oscar Wilde

“The silence is the worst part of any fight, because it's made up of all the things we wish we could say, if only we had the guts.”
― Pete Wentz, Gray

“It's amazing--my parents call everything a discussion. If I were standing across the street, firing a bazooka at my mother, while my father was launching mortar back at me, and Jeffery was charging down the driveway with a grenade in his teeth, my parents would say we should stop having this public "discussion".”
― Jordan Sonnenblick, Drums, Girls & Dangerous Pie

“If you don't want to be in an argument with someone, it is probably best to try to solve the problem, rather than lying around hoping the other person will do it for you.”
― E. Lockhart, The Boy Book: A Study of Habits and Behaviors, Plus Techniques for Taming Them

“A wise woman knows when to stay silent. However, a wiser woman of faith knows that sometimes words can win the battle, when all odds stand against her.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Very often the test of one's allegiance to a cause or to a people is precisely the willingness to stay the course when things are boring, to run the risk of repeating an old argument just one more time, or of going one more round with a hostile or (much worse) indifferent audience. I first became involved with the Czech opposition in 1968 when it was an intoxicating and celebrated cause. Then, during the depressing 1970s and 1980s I was a member of a routine committee that tried with limited success to help the reduced forces of Czech dissent to stay nourished (and published). The most pregnant moment of that commitment was one that I managed to miss at the time: I passed an afternoon with Zdenek Mlynar, exiled former secretary of the Czech Communist Party, who in the bleak early 1950s in Moscow had formed a friendship with a young Russian militant with an evident sense of irony named Mikhail Sergeyevitch Gorbachev. In 1988 I was arrested in Prague for attending a meeting of one of Vaclav Havel's 'Charter 77' committees. That outwardly exciting experience was interesting precisely because of its almost Zen-like tedium. I had gone to Prague determined to be the first visiting writer not to make use of the name Franz Kafka, but the numbing bureaucracy got the better of me. When I asked why I was being detained, I was told that I had no need to know the reason! Totalitarianism is itself a cliché (as well as a tundra of pulverizing boredom) and it forced the cliché upon me in turn. I did have to mention Kafka in my eventual story. The regime fell not very much later, as I had slightly foreseen in that same piece that it would. (I had happened to notice that the young Czechs arrested with us were not at all frightened by the police, as their older mentors had been and still were, and also that the police themselves were almost fatigued by their job. This was totalitarianism practically yawning itself to death.) A couple of years after that I was overcome to be invited to an official reception in Prague, to thank those who had been consistent friends through the stultifying years of what 'The Party' had so perfectly termed 'normalization.' As with my tiny moment with Nelson Mandela, a whole historic stretch of nothingness and depression, combined with the long and deep insult of having to be pushed around by boring and mediocre people, could be at least partially canceled and annealed by one flash of humor and charm and generosity.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Most people are not prepared to have their minds changed," he said. "And I think they know in their hearts that other people are just the same, and one of the reasons people become angry when they argue is that they realize just that, as they trot out their excuses."

"Excuses, eh?" Well, if this ain't cynicism, what is?" Erens snorted.

"Yes, excuses," he said, with what Erens thought might just have been a trace of bitterness. "I strongly suspect the things people believe in are usually just what they instinctively feel is right; the excuses, the justifications, the things you're supposed to argue about, come later. They're the least important part of the belief. That's why you can destroy them, win an argument, prove the other person wrong, and still they believe what they did in the first place." He looked at Erens. "You've attacked the wrong thing.”
― Iain M. Banks, Use of Weapons

“I'll tell you what's wrong!" he roared, "I'm trying to quit smoking!" Then he strode angrily to the truck, leaving her standing there.

She blinked her eyes, and slowly a smile stretched her lips. She strolled to the truck and got in. "So, are you homicidal or merely as irritable as a wounded buffalo?"

"About halfway in between," he said through clenched teeth.

"Anything I can do to help?"

His eyes were narrow and intense. "It isn't just the cigarettes. Take off your panties and lock your legs around me, and I'll show you.”
― Linda Howard, Duncan's Bride

“Father sighed. “Please spare me these arguments of yours.”

“Whose arguments should I use?”
― Franny Billingsley, Chime

“Maybe I’m strange and perverse, but I’ve always thought there was something sexy about a compelling argument.”
― Therese Doucet, A Lost Argument: A Latter-Day Novel

“Except that stopping midsentence is the worst thing people can do. It's like, totally passive-aggressive, because you can't take issue with anything they've said. You have to take issue with what you think they were going to say. Which then they deny.”
― Sophie Kinsella, Finding Audrey

“When you feel like throwing rocks, make sure they're ones no one can throw back.”
― Rebecca McKinsey

“You can't fight hatred with hatred and expect anyone to listen to you. You can only try to lessen it with humor, wit, truth and commonsense. If that doesn't work run like hell, while they throw rocks at you.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Blame the economy, blame bad luck, blame my parents, blame your parents, blame the Internet, blame people who use the Internet.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“If you can't impress them with your argument, impress them with your actions.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“The only way to efficiently battle evil is to copy enough to know how to counter each argument, yet not enough to believe all the bullshit.”
― Will Advise, Nothing is here...

“Ove could not in all honesty remember how it all started. It wasn't the sort of dispute where you did remember. It was more an argument where the little disagreements had ended up so entangled that every new word was treacherously booby-trapped, and in the end it wasn't possible to open one's mouth at all without setting off at least four unexploded mines from earlier conflicts. It was the sort of argument that had just run, and run, and run. Until one day it just ran out.”
― Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove

“In a short time a group of commissioners arrived to begin organization of a new Indian agency in the valley. One of them mentioned the advantages of schools for Joseph’s people. Joseph replied that the Nez Percés did not want the white man’s schools. “Why do you not want schools?” the commissioner asked. “They will teach us to have churches,” Joseph answered. “Do you not want churches?” “No, we do not want churches.” “Why do you not want churches?” “They will teach us to quarrel about God,” Joseph said. “We do not want to learn that. We may quarrel with men sometimes about things on this earth, but we never quarrel about God. We do not want to learn that.”
― Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West

“The real purpose of the opposition is to minimize the amount of money the ruling party will have stolen from the people at the end of its term.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“It is my rule never to take a side in any part in the quarrels of others, nor to inquire into them. I generally presume them to flow from the indulgence of too much passion on both sides, & always find that each party thinks all the wrong was in his adversary. These bickerings, which are always useless, embitter human life more than any other cause...”
― Thomas Jeffeson

“I strongly object to wrong arguments on the right side. I think I object to them more than to the wrong arguments on the wrong side.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton Volume 32: The Illustrated London News, 1920-1922

“In order to capture someone's attention, you must allow them to have the mental and emotional space to let you in.”
― Oscar Auliq-Ice

“The actual rewards that come from arguing with other people have nothing to do with winning and losing. A good argument helps us refine our own ideas and discover where our reasoning is the weakest. Other people's opposition can help us turn our own half-formed ideas into clear assertions backed by solid reasoning. And setting our ideas and opinions against someone else's helps us know each other better, which makes us better friends. We get these benefits from arguments when we collaborate with a partner. We do not get them when we try to destroy an enemy. That is how non-zero-sum games work.”
― Michael Austin, We Must Not Be Enemies: Restoring America's Civic Tradition

“In life, toughness and roughness go together.”
― Oscar Auliq-Ice

“Complaining solves nothing but creative problem solving amongst people with a common focus will produce solutions.”
― Oscar Auliq-Ice

“Once I make a decision, I decide to ignore any type of counter-arguments, no matter how reasonable they are. I have a strong personality; or, in other words, I’m an authentic imbecile.”
― Vizi Andrei, Economy of Truth