How to Argue and Win Every Time Quotes

“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

“Power can be safely exercised only in the service of that which is ostensibly good. Power is like gasoline. Spread aimlessly over the landscape, it can result in an inferno, causing untold harm. Correctly contained, it can cook supper or transport us to Boston.”
― Gerry Spence, How to Argue and Win Every Time

“Power is lonely. Power segregates. God must be the most lonely entity in the universe. No person is more lonely than a judge. No person needs a friend more. The boss was once a worker with many friends. Now he exists apart from them. He is lonely. Some of his old friends hate him. Others fear him. The parent is always separated from the child. Parents and children can be friendly. They can love each other. But rarely can they be friends, for they are never peers, which is the foundation of all friendships. Power, real or imagined, physical or psychological, isolates.”
― Gerry Spence, How to Argue and Win Every Time

“Arguing to hear one's own wonderful voice: I know people who use argument merely to hear their own voices. They are noisemakers. These people seem perfectly secure, but they are enchanted with their words, enthralled with their own wisdom, and they are, to be sure, as boring as popcorn without salt. They have, during the course of their lives, made so much noise and filled the air with so much authoritative banality that they have had no time to form an original thought, nor have they given themselves the opportunity to hear and learn anything from listening to anyone else.”
― Gerry Spence, How to Argue and Win Every Time