Quotes About Rhetoric

questions can outperform statements in persuading others.

Republican presidential debates have become contests of who can terrify viewers the most.

Every major power always seeks to justify its action on moral grounds. Such behaviour is almost as old as the hills. The west has been a particularly vigorous exponent of this credo; and there is no reason to believe that China, for example, will be any different. But behind the moral rhetoric invariably lies interest and ideology.

The Democrats can engage in the most reprehensible, mean-spirited, vile, vicious verbal attacks known in politics, and they get praised for it.

The problem for the Left, however, is that the moment it stops painting the Right as vile, it has to argue the issues.

The most important political task facing the out-of-power party - the Democrats for now - is creating a villain to run against. It's certainly easier than developing some grand new ideas or policies on which to campaign.

I condemn all statements - made in sincerity or jest - that threaten or suggest the use of violence against the president of the United States or any other public official. Such rhetoric cannot and will not be tolerated.

We must all come together to condemn political violence, most of all the national news media, and refuse to promote the dehumanizing rhetoric of fanatics.

Liberals need to take the advice they routinely give to conservatives: that there are consequences to their divisive rhetoric, and that in their attempts to score political points, they are also inciting violence.

We would naturally prefer not to reckon with the worst of what people do or say on the margins, but we have to. Especially if it seems possible to trace a line from vicious rhetoric on a computer screen to violent action.

Unfortunately, violent events and hate-filled rhetoric around the world provide ample opportunity for promoting religious hostility.

Southern politicians who have tried to rise above the passionate rhetoric surrounding the Civil War have frequently found themselves dragged back into the mire. Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, a Republican, was forced to apologise when his proclamation declaring April Confederate History Month failed to make any reference to slavery.

Neither Left nor Right has a monopoly of virtue when it comes to smearing opponents.

A populist feeding anger and fear is more likely to get elected.

Chuck (Schumer) just moo's and follows (Nancy) Pelosi into the cow chute.

Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society.

I have been thinking that I would make a proposition to my Republican friends... that if they will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them.

Numbers serve to discipline rhetoric. Without them it is too easy to follow flights of fancy, to ignore the world as it is and to remold it nearer the heart's desire.

Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity.

They are eloquent who can speak low things acutely, and of great things with dignity, and of moderate things with temper.

They don't need a lawyer, they need a toastmaster.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Politics are well past logic. It's entertainment.

How interesting that the Democrat, Martin Luther King, is identified with a principle that the Republican, Frederick Douglass, expressed even more eloquently so much earlier. How bizarre that the Democrats are presumed to be the party of civil rights when the very content of civil rights was formulated and developed by the GOP.