It isn't only in the name of free speech that the views of an itchy polemicist should be tolerated - and I say itchy polemicist promoting thought, not itchy ideologue promoting violence - but because provocation is indispensable to the workings of a sound, creative culture.

Howard Jacobson

It's tempting to engage in anti-gun polemics and hope that popular opinion will dramatically shift, but it is also likely a mistake. The smarter course for those who want stronger federal gun-control laws anytime soon is legislative stewardship and compromise.

Adam Cohen

Le Corbusier is an outstanding writer. His ideas achieved their impact in large measure because he could write so convincingly. His style is utterly clear, brusque, funny and polemical in the best way.

Alain de Botton

I wanted to cut past the polemics and experience London's Muslim communities for myself. My first visit was to Tower Hamlets, an East London borough that is about 38% Muslim, among the highest in the U.K. As I walked down Whitechapel Road, the adhan, or call to prayer, echoed through the neighborhood.

Andy Ngo

I'm not a polemicist; I had no business writing a polemic.

Ariel Levy

Well, I am not 100 percent sure of the definition of polemic, but it wasn't meant to convince anybody of anything.

Art Spiegelman

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

Read with care, George Orwell's diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.

Christopher Hitchens

The revolution is that we can be anything. We don't have to be one thing or the other. The idea that it is my responsibility to represent only good black people... I mean, what are you talking about? That's not a character - that's a polemic.

Courtney A. Kemp

When I say that George Eliot has long been my hero, I mean to include those aspects of her thought and temperament that have been disparaged or dismissed or ignored. She was, after all, a novelist who did not eschew politics or polemics - sometimes silently though defiantly, as in her relationship with George Henry Lewes.

Cynthia Ozick

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

I'm not a propagandist, I'm not a polemicist; my primary interest is just looking at and trying to understand how animals work.

David Attenborough

Scholastic learning and polemical divinity retarded the growth of all true knowledge.

David Hume

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

My writings are limited to depicting analytically, but also polemically, the horrors of reality. Redemption is the speciality of other authors, male and female.

Elfriede Jelinek

We often talk about this VAR, this new technology. It's very important new technology. On the pitch maybe it's not clear. You cannot see... maybe from another angle in front of the TV it's much more clear. But it's, as always, football. It's easy to be much more polemic about this and that.

Fabio Cannavaro

Innovation, being avant garde, is always polemic.

Ferran Adria

'Up in the Air' is not a political movie. It won't be mistaken for either a Michael Moore or Any Rand polemic on capitalism.

Frank Rich

It isn't only in the name of free speech that the views of an itchy polemicist should be tolerated - and I say itchy polemicist promoting thought, not itchy ideologue promoting violence - but because provocation is indispensable to the workings of a sound, creative culture.

Howard Jacobson

People aren't coming to me looking for political essays or polemic - they're looking for a rattling good story.

Ian Rankin

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