55 Polemic Quotes

Following is our list of polemic quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about .

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Short Polemic Quotes

  • An important work of architecture will create polemics. — Richard Meier
  • The camera can photograph thought. — Dirk Bogarde
  • When reason and unreason come into contact, an electrical shock occurs. This is called polemics. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
  • Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby. — Walter Benjamin
  • The camera can photograph thought. It's better than a paragraph of sweet polemic. — Dirk Bogarde
  • Innovation, being avant garde, is always polemic. — Ferran Adria
  • History is but the polemics of the victor. — William F. Buckley, Jr.
  • One parody is worth a thousand polemics. — Jennifer Stone
  • There's always a polemic in my clothes. — Vivienne Westwood
  • Literary criticism now is all pranks and polemics. — Mason Cooley

People Writing About Polemic

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Read quotes by Richard Meier

Richard Meier
quotes on life, education and leadership

25 755
Read quotes by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
quotes on education, religion and life

184 880
Read quotes by Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin
quotes on art, history and photography

143 1292
Read quotes by Ferran Adria

Ferran Adria

58 298
Read quotes by William F. Buckley, Jr.

William F. Buckley, Jr.
quotes on education, slavery and leadership

108 1378
Read quotes by Jennifer Stone

Jennifer Stone
quotes on life, leadership and love

58 22

More 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

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

Interfaith dialogue is a must today, and the first step in establishing it is forgetting the past, ignoring polemical arguments, and giving precedence to common points, which far outnumber polemical ones. — Fethullah Gulen

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

It is better to discuss things, to argue and engage in polemics than make perfidious plans of mutual destruction. — Mikhail Gorbachev

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

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

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

When I was younger I was much more polemical and didactic, much less trusting. Inherently my own vision of the world would weave its way through the characters. Also, my concerns are changing. What happens is you write a few plays and get boxed into some idea of what your concerns are and what you're supposed to be writing about. — Eve Ensler

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

We need to think about what cooking is, what context it takes place in and what its relationship to the world of art is. If there were criticisms of my presence at Documenta, that's a good thing because it means we were doing something new. Your mission in creating something artistic is to produce something new and polemical. — Ferran Adria

I do believe that those who compare the religious Right to the Nazis have fallen victim to polemical heat prostration. — Richard John Neuhaus

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

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

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

Well, I'm not involved in polemics. I never wanted to have any position of power, and I don't have it. — Kaija Saariaho

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

In the critics' vocabulary, the work 'precursor' is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemics or rivalry. — Jorge Luis Borges

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

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. — Carlisle Floyd

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

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

An essay is a thing of the imagination. If there is information in an essay, it is by-the-by, and if there is an opinion, one need not trust it for the long run. A genuine essay rarely has an educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use; it is the movement of a free mind at play. — Cynthia Ozick

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

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

There's actually a wonderful quote from Stanley Fish, who is sometimes very polemical and with whom I don't always agree. He writes, "Freedom of speech is not an academic value. Accuracy of speech is an academic value; completeness of speech is an academic value; relevance of speech is an academic value. Each of these is directly related to the goal of academic inquiry: getting a matter of fact right." — Joan Wallach Scott

We didn't set out to make some polemic about life in the digital age, I can only react emotionally to story ideas. You hear an idea and you go, 'That's cool. I can see spending a few years of my life working on that.' As a filmmaker, you approach it like, 'OK. They're going to give you all this money to make this movie. It's like an electric train set you get to play with.' — Jonathan Mostow

In general, I think every novel is a political novel, in that every novel is an argument about how the world works, who has power, who has a voice, what we should care about. But political novels can be boringly polemical if they end up being too black and white, too one dimensional, like war is bad, killing people is wrong. — Micah Perks

Painting allows me to use other portions of my brain pleasurably. Irony plays no part in what or how I paint. I paint the particular subject matter not to make polemical points but because I am interested in the human imprint on the landscape. I paint the landscape of my time and place with the stuff in it. — James Howard Kunstler

[He Stopped Loving Her Today] is all about the experience of being alive and the thought process of consciousness, and then you have these polemical essay-type things going on for a couple decades now. Some of these music books are where you're going to see an anecdote of a person behaving without some kind of commentary. — Scott McClanahan

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

How heartening it is to know that Ken Loach is still out there making committed, polemical cinema, so long as you don't have to watch it. Never go near a Ken Loach film unless you're trying to sleep with a socialist. If you are, however, Land And Freedom should do the trick. — David Bennun

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

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

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