Rhetoric Quotes

A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up the details...

If rhetoric study was the military, grammar teachers would be the drill sergeants.

the matter is as it is in all other cases: if it is naturally in you to be a good orator, a notable orator you will be when you have acquired knowledge and practice ...

Plato

From her character in the HBO miniseries: "The art of politics is the art of applying the seat of the britches to the seat of the chair.

Abigail Adams

When you depart from standard usage, it should be deliberate and not an accidental lapse. Like a poet who breaks the rules of poetry for creative effect, this only works when you know and respect the rule you are breaking. If you have never heard of the rules you are breaking, you have no right to do so, and you are likely to come off like a buffoon or a barbarian. Breaking rules, using slang and archaic language can be effective, but it is just as likely to give you an audience busy with wincing.

N.D. Wilson

In science, the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs.

William Osler

The weaker the argument the louder and more frequent the rhetoric.

Ken Poirot

[It is not] the poet's business to use verse as an advanced form of rhetoric, nor to give to political statements the aura of eternal truth.

George Oppen

It is this simplicity that makes the uneducated more effective than the educated when addressing popular audiences—makes them, as the poets tell us, 'charm the crowd's ears more finely.' Educated men lay down broad general principles; uneducated men argue from common knowledge and draw obvious conclusions.

Aristotle

True eloquence is irresistible. It charms by its images of beauty, it enforces an argument by its vehement simplicity. Orators whose speeches are "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," only prevail where truth is not understood, for knowledge and simplicity are the foundation of all true eloquence. Eloquence abounds in beautiful and natural images, sublime but simple conceptions, in passionate but plain words. Burning words appeal to the emotions as well as to the intellect; they stir the soul and touch the heart.

Albert Ellery Bergh

They were interchangeable tools, and the catchy phrases continued without abatement.

Robert A. Caro

Talent for oratory can simulate the need for action and even thought.

Barbara W. Tuchman

There is hardly a better way to avoid discussion than by releasing an argument from the control of the present and by saying that only the future will reveal its merits.

Hannah Arendt

[Rumsfield's] reply included a complex formulation that would become inextricably associated with him: 'There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.

Ian Leslie

We spend so much time bantering about the words when the real open conversations might very well be our actions. I worry about our rhetoric.

Anna Deavere Smith

Lincoln learned to summon the passions, but he never addressed his audience as sweethearts.

Richard Brookhiser

Metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with.

Milan Kundera

Lyndon Johnson knew how to make the most of such enthusiasm and how to play on it and intensify it. He wanted his audience to become involved. He wanted their hands up in the air. And having been a schoolteacher he knew how to get their hands up. He began, in his speeches, to ask questions.

Robert A. Caro

There is an expectation that we can talk about sins but no one must be identified as a sinner: newspapers love to describe words or deeds as “racially charged” even in those cases when it would be more honest to say “racist”; we agree that there is rampant misogyny, but misogynists are nowhere to be found; homophobia is a problem, but no one is homophobic. One cumulative effect of this policed language is that when someone dares to point out something as obvious as white privilege, it is seen as unduly provocative. Marginalized voices in America have fewer and fewer avenues to speak plainly about what they suffer; the effect of this enforced civility is that those voices are falsified or blocked entirely from the discourse.

Teju Cole

Another Mexican American in another class, approaches Victor after class, carrying his copy of Fahrenheit 451, required reading for the course. The student doesn't understand the reference to a salon. Victor explains that this is just another word for the living room. No understanding in the student's eyes. He tries Spanish: la salon. Still nothing. The student has grown up as a migrant worker. And Victor remembers the white student who had been in his class a quarter ago, who had written about not understanding racism, that there was none where he had grown up, in Wennatchee, that he has played with the children of his father's migrant workers without there being any hostility. His father's workers. Property. Property that doesn't know of living rooms. And Victor thought of what the man from Wennatchee knew, what the ROTC Mexican American knew, what the migrant worker knew. And he thought of getting up the next morning to go with Serena to St. Mary's for cheese and butter. And he knew there was something he was not doing in his composition classrooms.

Victor Villanueva

Rhetoric can be easily recognized for it is delightfully sweet sounding but it is utterly void of sacrifice, which means it is utterly void of substance. Christmas is irrefutable evidence that God never engages in rhetoric.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

He could be as memorable an orator as his father, particularly when he was speaking on that topic that had captured his imagination;

Robert A. Caro

Since Shakespeare had a feel for revolutionary rhetoric, let’s all cry: “Peace, freedom and liberty!

Carl William Brown

When (an advocate) is not thoroughly acquainted with the real strength and weakness of his cause, he knows not where to choose the most impressive argument. When the mark is shrouded in obscurity, the only substitute for accuracy in the aim is in the multitude of the shafts.

John Quincy Adams

Their message is conveyed in that hortatory tone and declamatory voice used by politicians when starting a condition contrary to fact. People who aren't cowed don't spend a lot of time proclaiming they won't be cowed. Leaders who really have strengthened the voice of freedom don't don't need to reassure there electorates that they're committed to doing so.

William Kristol

Chinese immigrant: "Americans make a mere practice of loving justice.

H.W. Brands

Whether it's trying to convince others that something is more true, more virtuous, or more desirable--all communication is rhetoric in action.

Leonard Koren

Language is not law; it is in fact a lot like music. Speech is jazz – first you learn the basic rules, and then you become good enough to improvise all the time. Writing is somewhat more like classical composition, where established forms and conditions will hold greater sway.

Robert Lane Greene

I discovered that night (in his college's student politics) that an audience has a feel to it, and, in the parlance of the theater, that audience and I were together.

Ronald Reagan

He was a man with a chest, and he wanted to give thoughtful expression to the passion of his heart.

Harvey Mansfield

He was a stylist, not a thinker. He spent time trying to say things in as complicated a way as possible.

Peter Heather

he knew, unlike most reporters, how to use pauses and the absence of words as effectively as the words themselves.

David Halberstam

Lyndon Johnson’s sentences were the sentences of a man with a remarkable gift for words, not long words but evocative, of a man with a remarkable gift for images, homey images of a vividness that infused the sentences with drama.

Robert A. Caro

Tell someone to do something, and you change their life–for a day; tell someone a story and you change their life.

N.T. Wright

Jefferson could strike up the band even when he was being lazy or fearful.

Richard Brookhiser

There is nothing quite as destructive to the gospel of Jesus Christ as the use of language that dismisses the way Jesus talks and prays and takes up instead the rhetoric of smiling salesmanship or vicious invective.

Eugene H. Peterson

Humor and seriousness can be an unstable mix.

Richard Brookhiser

He did what good lawyers always do. He shifted his argument in the direction his audience was already going.

Jeffrey Toobin

J.R.R. Tolkien, said a student, "could turn a lecture room into a mead hall in which he was the bard and we were the feasting, listening guests.

Philip Zaleski

How Horrid" has a slightly facetious tone that strikes me as Wildean. It appears to embrace the actual horror--puberty, public disgrace--then at the last second nimbly sidesteps it, laughing.

Alison Bechdel

Can I by justice or by crooked ways of deceit ascend a loftier tower which may he a fortress to me all my days? For what men say is that, if I am really just and am not also thought just profit there is none, but the pain and loss on the other hand are unmistakable. But if, though unjust, I acquire the reputation of justice, a heavenly life is promised to me. Since then, as philosophers prove, appearance tyrannizes over truth and is lord of happiness, to appearance I must devote myself.

Plato

At the beginning of a pestilence and when it ends, there's always a propensity for rhetoric. In the first case, habits have not yet been lost; in the second, they're returning. It is in the thick of a calamity that one gets hardened to the truth - in other words, to silence.

Albert Camus

Sometime rhetoric was just another way to lie and impress persons, and he knew this

Haidji

He wouldn't hear of anybody's paying taxes, though he was very patriotic.

Charles Dickens

Language has an ideological agenda that is apt to be hidden from view.

Neil Postman

Just as the soul animates the body, so, in a way, meaning breathes life into a word.

John of Salisbury

(Emerson's) aphorisms tend to be chicken soup for the academic soul or gobledygook of a man who prefers the sounds of words to their meanings.

Micah Mattix

Walter Mignolo terms and articulates _critical cosmopolitanism, juxtaposing it with globalization, which is a process of "the homogeneity of the planet from above––economically, politically and culturally." Although _globalization from below_ is to counter _globalization from above_ from the experience and perspective of those who suffer from the consequences of _globalization from above_, cosmopolitanism differs, according to Mignolo, form these two types of globalization. Mignolo defines globalization as 'a set of designs to manage the world,' and cosmopolitanism as 'a set of projects toward planetary conviviality

Namsoon Kang

Whenever one comes to the the table for interreligous dialogue, there is what I would call an _ecumenical taboo_ that one has to comply with. The ecumenical taboo_ does not exist in a written document, but people tend to practice it around the dialogue table. One should not raise, for instance, such questions as gender justice, sexual orientation issues, religious constructions of the other, multiple forms of violence in a religious community, or religious cooperation with neo/imperialism. each religion has its own _history of sin_ that has justified and perpetuated oppression and exclusion of certain groups of people through its own religious teaching, doctrine, and practice. In order to be _nice_ and _tolerant_ to one another, interreligious dialogue has not challenged the fundamental issues of injustice that a particular religion has practiced, justified, and perpetuated in various ways. I do not disregard that most ecumenists have based interreligious dialogue on a politics of tolerance, and this has played a significant role in easing the antagonism between religions, at least among the leaders of established religions. However, we should ground an authentic ecumenism and theology of religion in a _politics of affirmation and transformation, rather than a politics of tolerance_.

Namsoon Kang

Rhetoric is what shapes history, if not truth.

Anna Deavere Smith

whoever approaches his goal dances

Cormac McCarthy

In spite of his Cold War credentials, Kennedy still believed in the power of words.

Stephen L. Carter

If we do not touch the heart, we will soon weary the ear.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

In this era of public survival through continuous storytelling, people want someone who might surprise them.

Ron Suskind

Parables release the adrenaline of urgency into our bloodstream.

Eugene H. Peterson

Talk about presidents "taking" the country hither and yon is part of the foam of presidential elections.

George F. Will

The author characterizes Hamilton's tone in the Federalist papers by saying that he never spoke of problems but of being at the last stage in the crisis.

John Ferling

He uses the nice old words so rich in tradition to be sure I know he means it.

Frank Herbert

The art of oratory was considered part of the equipment of a statesman.

Barbara W. Tuchman

The author's alliterative description of politics since the 1960 presidential debates: "Government by Gotcha".

David Pietrusza

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