“Sir, I have found you an argument, but I am not obliged to find you an understanding.”
Permalink: Samuel Johnson
About this quote
Boswell records Johnson using it to close down an argument with a man who would not concede a point. The force is in the second clause, which declines to go on with the contest at all, and the sentence has become the standard English description of a conversation that has stopped being an exchange of reasons.
Source: The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell