Victor Tan

“Words that do not create images should be discarded. Words that have no intrinsic emotional or visual content ought to be avoided. Words that are directed to the sterile intellectual head-place should be abandoned. Use simple words, words that create pictures and action and that generate feeling.”
― Gerry Spence, How to Argue and Win Every Time

“It is clear that we require power. But the power we need is our own. The power exhibited in the winning argument may not be overtly powerful at all, for power may be experienced as gentleness, as compassion, as love, as humility, as sensitivity. We have come to understand that even sounds we thought powerful—the harsh voice of authority, the demanding dictates of the bully—are not sounds of power but the wretched noise of the insecure. We have come to understand that the application of excessive power often conceals cowardice or grave personality defects, that power is often useless to achieve what we want—to gain love or respect or success. And we have learned that power is deceptive, that at times there is no one more powerful than the powerless. So it has been throughout history. The Rockys have always been more powerful than the Apollo Creeds. The meek, unsullied by power, shall indeed inherit the earth.”
― Gerry Spence, How to Argue and Win Every Time

“The goal of many educators, albeit unconfessed, is to condition our young, who are perfectly alive with perfect feelings, to become separated from their feelings, to repress them, to deaden them. The scheme of too many parents and too many teachers is to teach these perfect little living creatures the attitudes of the dead and to instill in them the virtue of death, which is, of course, to be perfectly still, as if in the graveyard, perfectly silent, as if in the tomb, for the dead exhibit the most exemplary behavior. The dead never speak up or cause trouble. I say too many teachers and too many parents love the dead more than the living. But death comes soon enough. Death ought not be imposed upon our young before their time.”
― Gerry Spence, How to Argue and Win Every Time

“Every living thing feels because feeling is a dimension of the universe. I daresay rocks feel in the way of rocks. I daresay the stars feel in the way of stars. If we can feel stars, feel their beauty, feel their majesty, how could we so arrogantly insist that a star, one that has existed in the universe for billions of years, one that came into being at the time of the "big bang," cannot also feel? Any astrophysicist will tell us stars have lives of their own. How can we of such piddling knowledge, of such puny understanding, of such fleeting existence, how can we who live but who cannot fully explain the life of the simplest of cells—how can such as we proclaim that the universe is bereft of all feeling except our own? Can we not leave room for the possibility that the universe itself is composed of endless feeling?”
― Gerry Spence, How to Argue and Win Every Time