Win Every Argument Quotes

“It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it.”
― Mehdi Hasan, Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking

“Designing a presentation without an audience in mind is like writing a love letter and addressing it “to whom it may concern.”
― Mehdi Hasan, Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking

“When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion. —Dale Carnegie, author”
― Mehdi Hasan, Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking

“If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.”
― Mehdi Hasan, Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking

“In fact, what did I do when confronted with three rabidly anti-Islam opponents in a debate on Islam and peace at the Oxford Union in 2013? Simple. I questioned their credentials:”
― Mehdi Hasan, Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading and Public Speaking

“The critics would say that those GOP lawmakers—including Tim Murphy, the pro-life Pennsylvania Republican who resigned from Congress in 2017 after it emerged that he had asked his mistress to have an abortion—may indeed be raging hypocrites.”
― Mehdi Hasan, Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading and Public Speaking

“How important is the audience? Let me conclude with this quote from movie director Billy Wilder. “An audience is never wrong,” he remarked. “An individual member of it may be an imbecile, but a thousand imbeciles together in the dark—that is critical genius.”
― Mehdi Hasan, Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking

“I’m not arguing, I’m just explaining why I’m right.”
― Mehdi Hasan, Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking

“the dictum outlined by John Stuart Mill in his classic philosophical treatise On Liberty: He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion.”
― Mehdi Hasan, Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking

“nineteenth-century French essayist Joseph Joubert, who is said to have remarked: “It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it.”
― Mehdi Hasan, Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking

“Consider this: when you’re trying to change someone’s feelings or attitudes, your words account for just 7 percent of your overall message. Seven percent. That’s it. In contrast, your tone of voice accounts for 38 percent of it, and your body language accounts for a colossal 55 percent. This is the famous 7-38-55 rule, or concept, which Albert Mehrabian, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California, came up with in 1971 in his book Silent Messages.”
― Mehdi Hasan, Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking

“Republicans often win because “they have a near-monopoly in the marketplace of emotions,” while Democrats continue to naively “place their stock in the marketplace of ideas.”
― Mehdi Hasan, Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking

“according to a study conducted by researchers at Microsoft, the average human loses “concentration after eight seconds.”
― Mehdi Hasan, Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking

“Philosophically, I consider argument and debate to be the lifeblood of democracy, as well as the only surefire way to establish the truth.”
― Mehdi Hasan, Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking

“haste and passion” were the two biggest obstacles to “good counsel.”
― Mehdi Hasan, Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking

“In a 2007 study, Wharton professor of marketing and psychology Deborah Small and her two coauthors found that people ended up giving more money to charity upon hearing and seeing a story about a single “identifiable victim,” as opposed to one that described numerous “statistical victims” in the same plight. A story about a single child, with a name and a face, in need of help, has a much bigger and more direct impact on our level of empathy than a story about millions of nameless and faceless people in need.”
― Mehdi Hasan, Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking