HOW TO ARGUE AND WIN EVERY TIME

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. I am not as concerned about choosing the right words

But control in marriage has nothing to do with ability or success or even manliness. Strangely, it is the opposite. Everything in the love relationship mysteriously works in opposites.

Understand your power. Give yourself permission—only to win. But remember, arrogance, insolence, and stupidity are close relatives. Take the winning stance. Turn on the Magical Argument. Open up and let the magic out. Trust it. Take the risk. Jump.

Power, the pistol that fires in both directions: Power is like a pistol with barrels that point in both directions. When one with power pulls the trigger against someone with lesser power, one barrel fires in the direction of the intended victim while the other fires into the person who has pulled the trigger. As a weapon, power has little to offer

The parent-child mirror: In the days of my early parenthood, I had not learned that a relationship is always a mirror—that children cannot respect us if we do not respect them—that if we use power against our children our children will use power, sometimes in perverted forms, in return. I had not yet learned that if we treat our children as friends

I prepare by writing my argument for yet another reason—to explore what I know. We never know what is hidden in our psychic cracks and crevices until we search for it. As I began to write my thoughts about why writing our arguments is so important, I began to consider the relationship of the physical act of writing—the use of the fingers and the ha

To win, we must be believed. To be believed, we must be believable. To be believable, we must tell the truth, the truth about ourselves—the whole truth. Winston Churchill once said, "What the people really want to hear is the truth—it is the exciting thing—to speak the truth."

Here are the ten elements that make up the great power argument.

The chairman had introduced me simply by saying, "Here, in the flesh, is a living, breathing enemy of free speech, one who, by contagious hyperbole, was able to talk a jury into foregoing our sacred rights to free speech and to thereafter award his client twenty-five million dollars in damages for her alleged hurt feelings. That's justice, rig