Polemic Quotes

1. "Aggressiveness, complaints, pressures, drama and polemics can wipe out a favor or a promise and stain a generous deed."
Author: Angelica Hopes

2. "Well, I am not 100 percent sure of the definition of polemic, but it wasn't meant to convince anybody of anything."
Author: Art Spiegelman

3. "Like any other composer of opera, I choose a subject not for polemical reasons, but because it contains vivid characters in highly charged dramatic situations."
Author: Carlisle Floyd

4. "John Hodgson can describe Richard Dawkins's atheism as vacuous only because 'atheist' is a term which non-believers use purely as a polemical convenience when we have to define concisely what we don't believe [...]. No atheist is principally that. What we'd want to call ourselves is humanist or materialist, or biologist or linguist, or for that matter socialist, because one or more of these, or something else again, is what we do and think and are. We have 'purely and simply finished with God', to adapt a phrase of Engels's."
Author: David Craig

5. "Scholastic learning and polemical divinity retarded the growth of all true knowledge."
Author: David Hume

6. "Poetry is an intimate act. It's about bringing forth something that's inside you--whether it is a memory, a philosophical idea, a deep love for another person or for the world, or an apprehension of the spiritual. It's about making something, in language, which can be transmitted to others--not as information, or polemic, but as irreducible art."
Author: Dorianne Laux

7. "Innovation, being avant garde, is always polemic."
Author: Ferran Adria

8. "'Up in the Air' is not a political movie. It won't be mistaken for either a Michael Moore or Any Rand polemic on capitalism."
Author: Frank Rich

9. "I want to find a way of speaking to fellow human beings that will be cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical, that will bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the righteous and the sinners, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats."
Author: J.M. Coetzee

10. "In early church polemics, Jews are deemed no longer worthy of their own Scriptures because they have failed to accept Christ as the Messiah."
Author: Jack Schwartz

11. "Reading Virginia Woolf will change your life, may even save it. If you want to make sense of modern life, the works of Virginia Woolf remain essential reading. More than fifty years since her death, accounts of her life still set the pace for modern modes of living. Plunge (and this Introduction is intended to help you take the plunge) into Woolf 's works – at any point – whether in hernovels, her short stories, her essays, her polemical pamphlets, or her published letters, diaries, memoirs and journals – and you will be transported by her elegant, startling, buoyant sentences to a world where everything in modern life (cinema, sexuality, shopping, education, feminism, politics, war and so on) is explored and questioned and refashioned."
Author: Jane Goldman

12. "I sometimes, in my sprightly moments, consider myself, in my great chair at school, as some dictator at the head of a common-wealth. In this little state I can discover all the great geniuses, all the surprising actions and revolutions of the great world in miniature. I have several renowned generals but three feet high, and several deep-projecting politicians in petticoats. I have others catching and dissecting flies, accumulating remarkable pebbles, cockleshells, etc., with as ardent curiosity as any virtuoso in the Royal Society …. At one table sits Mr. Insipid foppling and fluttering, spinning his whirligig, or playing with his fingers as gaily and wittily as any Frenchified coxcomb brandishes his cane and rattles his snuff box. At another sits the polemical divine, plodding and wrangling in his mind about Adam's fall in which we sinned, all as his primer has it."
Author: John Adams

13. "In the critic's vocabulary, the word "precursor" is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemic or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future."-- Essay: "Kafka and his Precursors"
Author: Jorge Luis Borges

14. "When reason and unreason come into contact, an electrical shock occurs. This is called polemics."
Author: Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

15. "The Eisenhower Memorial competition and project have stirred a remarkable polemic, the center of which is not President Eisenhower or Washington, D.C. but Mr. Gehry and the values he promulgates."
Author: Leon Krier

16. "I may well do some more polemical writing, if a subject that fires me up comes along. Apart from that possibility, I would like to continue to tell stories so long as I have stories to tell."
Author: Louis Begley

17. "Polemical debates happen all the time in France."
Author: Michel Houellebecq

18. "Moreover, we have seen enough by now to know that technological changes in our modes of communication are even more ideology-laden than changes in our modes of transportation. Introduce the alphabet to a culture and you change its cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community, history and religion. Introduce the printing press with movable type, and you do the same. Introduce speed-of-light transmission of images and you make a cultural revolution. Without a vote. Without polemics. Without guerrilla resistance. Here is ideology, pure if not serene. Here is ideology without words, and all the more powerful for their absence. All that is required to make it stick is a population that devoutly believes in the inevitability of progress. And in this sense, all Americans are Marxists, for we believe nothing if not that history is moving us toward some preordained paradise and that technology is the force behind that movement."
Author: Neil Postman

19. "Any work of architecture that has with it some discussion, some polemic, I think is good. It shows that people are interested, people are involved."
Author: Richard Meier

20. "An important work of architecture will create polemics."
Author: Richard Meier

21. "Even a polemic has some justification if one considers that my own first poetic experiments began during a dictatorship and mark the origin of the Hermetic movement."
Author: Salvatore Quasimodo

22. "Literature, art, science, and religion degenerate when polemical struggle supplants the independent creation of ideas."
Author: Semen Frank

23. "Quando i bambini crescono e diventano adulti, capiscono subito che quello che gli avevano detto da bambini non è vero, eppure riciclano ai loro figli l'antica bugia. E cioè che tutti vogliono consegnare ai bambini un mondo migliore, è un passaparola che dura da secoli, e il risultato è questa Terra, questa vescichetta d'odio.Perciò io, che sono una bambina in scadenza, penso:a) che i grandi non hanno più nulla da insegnarci;b) che sarebbe meglio se noi prendessimo le decisioni, e i temi scolastici contro la guerra li scrivessero loro;c) che dovrebbero smettere di fare i film dove la giustizia trionfa e farla trionfare subito all'uscita del cinema.Ebbene sì, sono polemica."
Author: Stefano Benni

24. "I'm a better polemicist in prose."
Author: Ted Rall

25. "But I still read Shaw on a regular basis. What I love is the nakedness of the polemic and the irresistible good humour. For me, 'Major Barbara' is the greatest of all the plays in that it starts from the rational and proceeds to the ecstatic in a spectacular way, and leaves you very confused if you cling to Euclidean logic."
Author: Tony Kushner

Polemic Quotes Pictures