Quotes About Rhetoric

This early dialogue features the charismatic young politician Alcibiades in conversation with Socrates.

GORGIAS: Yes. SOCRATES: Do you mean that you will teach him to gain the ears of the multitude on any subject, and this not by instruction but by persuasion? GORGIAS: Quite so.

SOCRATES: Will you understand my answer? Rhetoric, according to my view, is the ghost or counterfeit of a part of politics. POLUS: And noble or ignoble? SOCRATES: Ignoble, I should say, if I am compelled to answer, for I call what is bad ignoble: though I doubt whether you understand what I was saying before. GORGIAS: Indeed, Socrates, I cannot say that I understand myself.

Are you one of those people who uses words more for the sound than for the sense of them?

The more a man is given to sentiment ,the more likely is he to be wordy and to speak well.

Who, pray tell, is for leaving the naked unclothed and the hungry without food? Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism advocated caring for the helpless millennia before Marx was born. So, when the Jewish, Christian, or secular Left tell us repeatedly that they are for clothing the naked, they really mean two other things: (1) Their opponents are not for feeding the hungry and clothing the naked and (2) Only those who affirm Left-wing policies are.

it does not escape me that one can wield Sword or Musket only upon one Enemy at a time, while Words may be employed upon any Number.

I have a bigger voice than Donald Trump, you know what I'm saying? Than literally anybody that works in politics.

Nobody does more identity politics than Donald Trump.

Donald Trump is white ISIS - WISIS.

Trump has a way of driving a message so people hear it.

If you're just inflaming your electorate, are you making anything better?

One man excels in eloquence, another in arms.

I am not eloquent.

In an easy matter. Anybody can be eloquent.

He loved florid verbiage and jaw-jaw until he cuts himself on Occam's razor.

Fallacious and misleading arguments are most easily detected if set out in correct syllogistic form

Those poor people know Communism gives them bread, while democracy gives them a vote and a Letter to the Editor.

The ancients, who in these matters were not perhaps such blockheads as some may conceive, considered poetical quotation as one of the requisite ornaments of oratory.

Quotation, like much better things, has its abuses. One may quote till one compiles. The ancient lawyers used to quote at the bar till they had stagnated their own cause.

Diskurse herrschen nicht. Sie erzeugen eine kommunikative Macht, die die administrative nicht ersetzen kann, sondern nur beeinflussen kann.

The best argument is that which seems merely an explanation.

Politics is made up largely of irrelevancies.

Who was Hitler?' I said. Tyrena smiled slightly. 'An Old Earth politician who did some writing.