Quotes About Rhetoric

Yesterday, we slaughtered them and we will continue to slaughter them.

Bush, Blair and Rumsfeld; they are the funny trio.

The insane little dwarf, Bush.

We will slaughter them; Bush Junior, and his international gang of bastards!

The Democrats planned to fiddle while Rome burned. The Republicans were going to burn Rome, then fiddle.

Recent presidents have gone off on ad hoc adventures. They have set unattainable goal because they have framed the issue incorrectly, as they believed their own rhetoric.

Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build bridges even when there are no rivers.

The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.

If you can't convince them, confuse them.

In politics, an absurdity is not a handicap.

Tony Blair is like an actor who doesn't really believe in his script himself but has the incredible skill to make everyone else believe in it.

I'm furious about the women's liberationists. They keep getting up on soapboxes and proclaiming that women are brighter than men. That's true, but it should be kept very quiet or it ruins the whole racket.

Democracy is the name we give the people whenever we need them.

Anthony, do you want a police force or a campaign ad?

Why do you rant and brag with such a spate of words, as if you wanted to overwhelm me with a sort of tempest and deluge of oratory-which nevertheless falls with the greater force on your own head, while my ark rides aloft in safety?

I am persuaded that without knowledge of literature pure theology cannot at all endure. . . . When letters have declined and lain prostrate, theology, too, has wretchedly fallen and lain prostrate. . . . It is my desire that there shall be as many poets and rhetoricians as possible, because I see that by these studies as by no other means, people are wonderfully fitted for the grasping of sacred truth and for handling it skillfully and happily.

It was expected, however, that [Erasmus] should make some reply and give some definition. But instead, by availing himself of a rhetorical transition, he drags us who knew nothing of rhetoric away with him, as if the matter at issue here were of no moment, but simply a lot of quibbling, and dashes bravely out of the crowded court, crowned with ivy and laurel.

The design of Rhetoric is to remove those Prejudices that lie in the way of Truth, to Reduce the Passions to the Government of Reasons to place our Subject in a Right Light, and excite our Hearers to a due consideration of it.

Public speech was a—if not the—defining attribute of maleness. Or, to quote a well-known Roman slogan, the elite male citizen could be summed up as vir bonus dicendi peritus, 'a good man, skilled in speaking.' A woman speaking in public was, in most circumstances, by definition not a woman.

But all tactics of that type tend to leave women still feeling on the outside, impersonators of rhetorical roles that they don't feel they own. Putting it bluntly, having women pretend to be men may be a quick fix, but it doesn't get to the heart of the problem.

Trump and Clinton, Perseus and Medusa, and rest my case.

Rome was no more conservative than nineteenth-century Britain. In both places, radical innovation thrived in dialogue with all kinds of ostensibly conservative traditions and rhetoric.

Cicero's eloquence, even if only half understood, still informs the language of modern politics.

Cicerón hizo ejecutar a los hombres sumariamente, sin ni siquiera un juicio de farsa. Con triunfalismo, anunció sus muertes a la entusiasmada multitud con un famoso eufemismo de una sola palabra: vixere, «han vivido»; es decir, «están muertos».