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Who can refute a sneer? -- William Paley
Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute. -- Josh Billings
Our politicians don't say anything anymore: they just refute and assert. -- Beeban Kidron
After I set out to refute Christianity intellectually and couldn't, I came to the conclusion the Bible was true and Jesus Christ was God's Son. -- Josh McDowell
I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal, and rebut the refutation. -- Tom Stoppard
There's so much denial in gymnastics. It's a beautiful sport but the other part is numbing. You become machinelike. They'll refute this, but I've been around it. I know. -- Cathy Rigby
As for the assertion that nuclear weapons prevent wars, how many more wars are needed to refute this arguments? Tens of millions have died in the many wars that have taken place since 1945. -- Joseph Rotblat
Put bluntly, the American church today accepts grace in theory but denies it in practice. We say we believe that the fundamental structure of reality is grace, not works - but our lives refute our faith. -- Brennan Manning
In fact men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth - often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable. -- Hypatia
Class of 2009: you are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on Earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation... but not one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement. -- Paul Hawken
Religious people know deep down that that is the most vulnerable area of their lives, and when others question it, they are liable to hit out and feel insulted. You know it is absolutely without proof, yet people still commit themselves totally to this belief. They cannot refute it because it is so central to their lives. -- John Hurt
Yawns are hard to refute. -- Mason Cooley
Good books are irrefutable, and bad books refute themselves. -- Remy de Gourmont
One cannot refute what one has not thoroughly understood. -- Leo Strauss
We can refute assertions, but who can refute silence? -- Charles Dickens
Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute -- Josh Billings
People can refute your facts, but never your feelings. -- Sharon Anthony Bower
I often play a move I know how to refute. -- Bent Larsen
It takes one minute to tell a lie, and an hour to refute it. -- Noam Chomsky
Pain shared is pain lessened; joy shared is joy increased. Thus do we refute entropy. -- Spider Robinson
Philosophy may describe unreasoning, as it may describe force; it cannot hope to refute them. -- George Santayana
Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it. -- Karl Popper
Contempt is the emotion we feel for an opponent whose arguments are too formidable to refute. -- Ann Coulter
One truth doesn't refute another. Truth doesn't lie in the object, but in how we see it. -- Michael J. Sullivan
Opponents fancy they refute us when they repeat their own opinion and pay no attention to ours. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Our belief in any particular natural law cannot have a safer basis than our unsuccessful critical attempts to refute it. -- Karl Popper
If you have a very commanding argument that you cannot refute, not to accept the argument is to act irrationally. -- Robert F. Almeder
[Art] can speak its own language only as long as the images are alive which refuse and refute the established order. -- Herbert Marcuse
Science cannot destroy the consciousness of freedom, without which there is no morality and no art, but it can refute it. -- Isaiah Berlin
The poem began with the title. Then I was annoyed by one of the occasional poetry-is-dead articles. Then I refute that notion. -- Thomas Lux
Shakespeare never had six lines together without a fault. Perhaps you may find seven, but this does not refute my general assertion. -- Samuel Johnson
The 'harmonious world' theory .. will help dispel doubts in the international community about China's continued development and refute the absurd 'China threat theory'. -- Ye Xiaowen
The art of conversation is to be prompt without being stubborn, to refute without argument, and to clothe great matters in a motley garb. -- Benjamin Disraeli
Peaceful New Yorkers, pls refute the Ground Zero mosque plan if you believe catastrophic pain caused @ Twin Towers site is too raw, too real. -- Sarah Palin
People still retain the errors of their childhood, their nation, and their age, long after they have accepted the truths needed to refute them. -- Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet
Shutting down discussion is self-defeating and impedes progress. We need to talk and listen and debate and refute and instruct and learn and evolve." -- Sheryl Sandberg
Facts per se can neither prove nor refute anything. Everything is decided by the interpretation and explanation of the facts, by the ideas and the theories. -- Ludwig von Mises
I prefer to be refuted than to refute, for it is a greater good for oneself to be freed from the greatest evil than to free another. -- Socrates
Once you have confidence in your instincts, you must never allow other people's refusal to believe, or their data to refute, what you instinctively know is true. -- T. D. Jakes
I also suspect that many workers in this field [molecular biology] and related fields have been strongly motivated by the desire, rarely actually expressed, to refute vitalism. -- Francis Crick
Silence is one of the hardest kind of arguments to refute. There is no good substitute for wisdom; but silence is the best that has yet been discovered. -- Josh Billings
By positional play a master tries to prove and exploit true values, whereas by combinations he seeks to refute false values ... A combination produces an unexpected re-assessment of values. -- Emanuel Lasker
No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion. -- David Hume
Properly measured, the average actively managed dollar must underperform the average passively managed dollar, net of costs. Empirical analyses that appear to refute this principle are guilty of improper measurement. -- William Forsyth Sharpe
I'm the kind of person who embarks on an endless leapfrog down the great moral issues. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal and rebut the refutation. Endlessly. -- Tom Stoppard
To command their professors of astronomy to refute their own observations is to command them not to see what they do see and not to understand what they do understand. -- Galileo Galilei
If the book be false in its facts, disprove them; if false in its reasoning, refute it. But, for God's sake, let us freely hear both sides, if we choose. -- Thomas Jefferson
One can prove or refute anything at all with words. Soon people will perfect language technology to such an extent that they'll beproving with mathematical precision that twice two is seven. -- Anton Chekhov
Ignorance of the law excuses no man; not that all men know the law, but because 'tis an excuse every man will plead, and no man can tell how to refute him. -- John Selden
The biogeographic evidence for evolution is now so powerful that I have never seen a creationist book, article, or lecture that has tried to refute it. Creationists simply pretend that the evidence doesn't exist. -- Jerry A. Coyne

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