Quotes About Rhetoric

Spoken words have power beyond measure.

I hate those Socratic dialogues where everything gets drawn out at the pace of an excessively logical snail.

we have let rhetoric do the job of poetry.

The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children.

The poetry of speech.

I bless the gods for not letting my education in rhetoric, poetry, and other literary studies come easily to me, and thereby sparing me from an absorbing interest in these subjects.

Of our conflicts with others we make rhetoric of our conflicts with ourselves we make poetry.

The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.

The Tories, every election, must have a bogy man. If you haven't got a programme, a bogy man will do.

In politics we presume that everyone who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state. When we are ill... we do not ask for the handsomest physician, or the most eloquent one.

The unpleasant sound Bush is emitting as he traipses from one conservative gathering to another is a thin, tinny "arf" - the sound of a lap dog.

There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money and I can't remember what the second one is.

Politics is the art of making your selfish desires seem like the national interest.

Is politics nothing other than the art of deliberately lying?

A politician's words reveal less about what he thinks about his subject than what he thinks about his audience.

Rhetoric is a poor substitute for action, and we have trusted only to rhetoric. If we are really to be a great nation, we must not merely talk; we must act big.

A hypocrite is the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree, then mount the stump and make a speech for conservation.

It is dangerous for a national candidate to say things that people might remember.

Politics is the art of anesthesia.

All politics takes place on a slippery slope. The most important four words in politics are up to a point.

Take our politicians: they're a bunch of yo-yos. The presidency is now a cross between a popularity contest and a high school debate, with an encyclopedia of cliches.

...Politics is not about facts. It is about what politicians can get people to believe.

In every election in American history both parties have their cliches. The party that has the cliches that ring true wins.

All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies.