These polemic quotes will inspire you. Polemic, a strong verbal or written attack on someone or something.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging polemic quotes, polemic sayings, and polemic proverbs.
Best Polemic Quotes
- “Well, I am not 100 percent sure of the definition of polemic, but it wasn’t meant to convince anybody of anything.” ~ Art Spiegelman
- “It is better to discuss things, to argue and engage in polemics than make perfidious plans of mutual destruction.” ~ Mikhail Gorbachev
- “When reason and unreason come into contact, an electrical shock occurs. This is called polemics.” ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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“Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.” ~ Walter Benjamin
- “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.” ~ Richard Meier , Work polemic quotes
- “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.” ~ Salvatore Quasimodo
- “The camera can photograph thought. It’s better than a paragraph of sweet polemic.” ~ Dirk Bogarde
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“Innovation, being avant garde, is always polemic.” ~ Ferran Adria
- “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.” ~ Tony Kushner
- “The two main ideas that run through all of my writing, whether it be literary criticism or political polemic are these: I am strong in favor of liberty and I hate fraud.” ~ H. L. Mencken
- “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” ~ Jorge Luis Borges
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“An important work of architecture will create polemics.” ~ Richard Meier
- “I wasn’t trying to write a corrective novel – that would just end up tasting like medicine, and I tried to stay away from polemics as best I could. I think that, if anything, Fobbit is my way of showing readers there’s another side to war – the backstage of combat, if you will. If you play a word association game with Americans and say “war,” what’s the first thing that comes to mind? Soldiers running across a battlefield through a hail of bullets, right? Rambo, smoke, explosions. In Fobbit, I hope readers will see something a little different” ~ Dave Abrams
- “Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.” ~ Jorge Luis Borges
- “Passionate and forcefully argued, Tar Sands is a wake-up call not just to Canadians but to the wider world to take a serious look at what is happening in northern Alberta. To call this book a polemic is a compliment.” ~ Margaret MacMillan
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“No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes the scripture.” ~ Learned Hand
- “In the critics’ vocabulary, the work ‘precursor’ is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemics or rivalry.” ~ Jorge Luis Borges
- “I think the problem with polemics is that it’s general and it’s lazy. When you say, “This is bad,” that’s a general thing. We’re more interested in asking the question.” ~ Tony Goldwyn
- “Leading the Jewish people is not easy — we are a divided, obstinate, highly individualistic people who have cultivated faith, sharp wittedness and polemics to a very high level.” ~ Shimon Peres
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“The camera can photograph thought.” ~ Dirk Bogarde
- “Monster is a compassionate picture without any obvious agenda. And it’s effective precisely because it’s not a polemic.” ~ Stephanie Zacharek
- “The polemics of right-wing radio are putting nothing less than hate onto the airwaves, into the marketplace, electing it to office, teaching it in schools, and exalting it as freedom.” ~ Patricia J. Williams
- “My father’s little library consisted chiefly of books in polemic divinity, most of which I read, and have since often regretted that, at a time when I had such a thirst for knowledge, more proper books had not fallen in my way since it was now resolved I should not be a clergyman.” ~ Benjamin Franklin
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“Well, I’m not involved in polemics. I never wanted to have any position of power, and I don’t have it.” ~ Kaija Saariaho
- “A play is basically a long, formalistic polemic. You can write it without the poetry, and if you do, you may have a pretty good play. We know this because we see plays in translation. Not many people speak Norwegian or Danish or whatever guys like Ibsen spoke, or Russian – yet we understand Chekhov and the others.” ~ David Mamet
- “Approaching any movie with a three in the title you know you are not going to get a political polemic. You are not going to get some sort of political statement or ultra-deep message.” ~ J. J. Abrams
- “This book is not a polemic treatise but a powerful, well-researched account that sensitizes any reader to the ways in which in-difference permits brutality and genocide.” ~ John M Swomley
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“There’s always a polemic in my clothes.” ~ Vivienne Westwood
- “You can’t please everyone, especially if you’re doing very radical things at the vanguard of cooking. That’s life; it’s a polemic I’ve lived with since I started cooking.” ~ Ferran Adria
- “No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes scripture; but modern history is not a very satisfactory side-arm in political polemics; it grows less and less so.” ~ Learned Hand
- “People have been modeling their lives after films for years, but the medium is somehow unsuited to moral lessons, cautionary tales or polemics of any kind.” ~ Renata Adler
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“One parody is worth a thousand polemics.” ~ Jennifer Stone
- “In good novelistic fashion, the discovery I’ve made is that it’s complicated. I think that’s one of good things about exploring these questions in a non-polemic, fictional way: you get to feel out territory rather than take positions. Through writing this, I can understand the impulse to faith, how people make meaning, how people make community, without having to say, do this, don’t do that, or I believe, I don’t believe.” ~ Hari Kunzru
- “I was sick of the way my lyrics had been extrapolated, their meanings subverted into polemics and that I had been anointed as the Big Bubba of Rebellion, High Priest of Protest, the Duke of Disobedience, Leader of the Freeloaders, Kaiser of Apostasy, Archbishop of Anarchy, the Big Cheese. Horrible titles any way you want to look at it. All code words for Outlaw.” ~ Bob Dylan
- “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.” ~ Dorianne Laux
- “(The terms douloi, banausoi and aristoi) are in a way more precise, but what is more vital and valuable, they are more comprehensive: they project a concept of psychic order that embraces entire fields that we have no other way of seeing all together as the working of a single principle. If we think of the human domain as the collaboration and the conflict of these three diverse character-types, we can understand the weave and the stress and polemics of their very different basal teleologies or ultimate governing purposes of life.” ~ Kenny Smith
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“History is but the polemics of the victor.” ~ William F. Buckley, Jr.
- “Thinking is the subtlest form of self-polemics, the art of a certain finesse in psychological self-vivisection and self-crucifixion (Hegel of course called the path of self-disillusion the via dolorosa or “highway of despair,” in Baillie’s fine and florid rendering, like Jesus’ route to Golgotha).” ~ Kenny Smith
- “Nietzsche’s vision of the superman is of someone who’s able to control and tame his passions and turn them into something richer than raw emotion and raw feeling. I think the best writing does that too. Untamed passion basically results in bad writing or bad polemics, which so many writers and public intellectuals are vulnerable to.” ~ Pankaj Mishra
- “Good writing must stay open to the questions and not fall prey to the pull of a polemic, otherwise, words simply become predictable, sentimental, and stale.” ~ Terry Tempest Williams
- “When a comic becomes enamored with his own views and foists them off on the public in a polemic way, he loses not only his sense of humor but his value as a humorist.” ~ Johnny Carson
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“Literary criticism now is all pranks and polemics.” ~ Mason Cooley
- “I am not interested in making didactic polemical statements. That is not the way I want to make films. There is a place for polemics, but I don’t think that it is in fictional cinema. Fictional cinema works subtly and deeply.” ~ Sally Potter
- “In language at once stark and delicate, Suki Kim shatters the polemic of North and South Korea. She couples an investigative reporter’s fierce desire to strip away the fiction of the Hermit Kingdom with an immigrant’s insatiable hunger for an emotional home, no matter how troubled and no matter how impossible.” ~ Monique Truong
- “Again, men tell us that our preaching should be positive and not negative, that we can preach the truth without attacking error. But if we follow that advice we shall have to close our Bible and desert its teachings. The New Testament is a polemic book almost from beginning to end … It is when men have felt compelled to take a stand against error that they have risen to the really great heights in the celebration of the truth” ~ John Gresham Machen
- “Absolute Evil is not the kingdom of hell. The inhabitants of hell are ourselves, i.e., those who pay our painful, embarrassing, humanistic duties to society and who are compromised by our intellectually dubious commitment to virtue, which can be defined by the perpetual smear-word of French polemic: the bourgeois. (Bourgeois equals humanist.) This word has long been anathema in France where categories are part of the ruling notion of logique. The word cannot be readily matched in England or America.” ~ V. S. Pritchett
