Quotes About Rhetoric

I had won the argument, but somehow, as in our college days, he had won the audience.

slogans were empty suits draped on the corpse of an idea?

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats—and one always secretes too much jelly.

We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, and scorn toward those who disagree with us.

that social-chauvinism (socialism in words, chauvinism in deeds)

rhetoric is will doing the work of imagination

When I was 12 years old, my pastor came to the church: Dr. Fredrick Samson. And that was revolutionary because he mentored me and I got a chance to see up close the impact of a rhetorical genius.

You raise your voice when you should reinforce your argument.

Public speaking is the art of diluting a two-minute idea with a two-hour vocabulary.

In politics, if you're explaining, you're loosing.

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 ...

there is no necessity for the man who means to be an orator to understand what is really just but only what would appear so to the majority of those who will give judgment; and not what is really good or beautiful but whatever will appear so; because persuasion comes from that and not from the truth.

The reason is that they utter these words of theirs not by virtue of a skill, but by a divine power - otherwise, if they knew how to speak well on one topic thanks to a skill, they would know how to speak about every other topic too.

I grow impatient at the length of your exordium.

So when the orator is more convincing than the doctor, what happens is that an ignorant person is more convincing than the expert before an equally ignorant audience.

I do not know, men of Athens, how my accusers affected you; as for me, I was almost carried away in spite of myself, so persuasively did they speak. And yet, hardly anything of what they said is true.

Arguments, like men, are often pretenders.

A rhetorician is capable of speaking effectively against all comers, whatever the issue, and can consequently be more persuasive in front of crowds about… anything he likes.

Then, when the rhetorician is more persuasive than the physician, the ignorant is more persuasive with the ignorant than he who has knowledge?—is not that the inference?

Like mythology, Greek philosophy has a tendency to personify ideas. And the Sophist is not merely a teacher of rhetoric for a fee of one or fifty drachmae (Crat.), but an ideal of Plato's in which the falsehood of all mankind is reflected.

to suffer is better than to do evil;' and the art of rhetoric is described as only useful for the purpose of self-accusation.

longest of his works

How you, O Athenians, have been affected by my accusers, I cannot tell; but I know that they almost made me forget who I was—so persuasively did they speak; and yet they have hardly uttered a word of truth.

And the same will be true of the orator and the oratory in relation to all other arts. The orator need have no knowledge of the truth about thongs; it is enough for him to have discovered a knack of persuading the ignorant that he seems to know more than the experts.