“Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired.”

Jonathan Swift (1667 to 1745), from the 1721 “A Letter to a Young Gentleman Lately Enter’d Into Holy Orders by a Person of Quality”

In other words, if someone has an unreasonable opinion about something based on nonsense, it does not matter how much reasoning you do with them, you will never reason them out of it because reasoning did not get them there in the first place.

Jonathan Swift, pseudonym Isaac Bickerstaff, was an Anglo-Irish author, who was the foremost prose satirist in the English language.

Besides the celebrated novel Gulliver’s Travels (1726), he wrote such shorter works as A Tale of a Tub (1704) and “A Modest Proposal” (1729).