“A single fact will often spoil an interesting argument.”

Superior Nutrition, as quoted in Philip Kapleau, To Cherish All Life (The Zen Center, 1981), p. 134 https://archive.org/stream/DhammapadaIllustrated_201611/Buddhism/To%20Cherish%20All%20Life#page/n134/mode/2up/search/notable+persons.

Source: The Notebooks of Paul Brunton

Variant: I dislike arguments of any kind. They are always vulgar and often convincing.

Source: Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950), pp. 443-444.
Context: I am not very impressed with theological arguments whatever they may be used to support. Such arguments have often been found unsatisfactory in the past. In the time of Galileo it was argued that the texts, "And the sun stood still... and hasted not to go down about a whole day" (Joshua x. 13) and "He laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not move at any time" (Psalm cv. 5) were an adequate refutation of the Copernican theory.

Letter to Fanny Knight (1817-03-13) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

"From The Wreave Commentary"; p. 136
The Bureau of Sabotage series, Whipping Star (1969)

Part 3: "The Sense of Human Dignity", §1 (p. 52)
Science and Human Values (1956, 1965)
Context: No fact in the world is instant, infinitesimal and ultimate, a single mark. There are, I hold, no atomic facts. In the language of science, every fact is a field — a crisscross of implications, those that lead to it and those that lead from it. … We condense the laws around concepts. Science takes its coherence, its intellectual and imaginative strength together, from the concepts at which its laws cross, like knots in a mesh.

"Q&A: Putin's Critical Adviser," 2005

Source: A Dictionary of Thoughts, 1891, p. 162.