Quotes About Rhetoric

When our opponents on the Left have no serious ideas of their own, they resort to emotional appeals that play up Americans' fears about the future.

Almost 3,000 people were murdered at the WTC on the morning of September 11, 2001. The United States has invaded two countries under cover of the rhetoric of the War on Terror, resulting in massive casualties and unprecedented deficit spending. We have lost many of our civil liberties as a result of the PATRIOT Act, the Military Commissions Act, and other laws enacted in reaction to 9/11. Once you, too, investigate the evidence we believe that you will want to take action.

Speeches are not magic and there is no great speech without great policy.

You must be able to say the sentences you write. And so they cannot be long and serpentine things that curl around clauses, caress subclauses, encompass extended metaphor, stop briefly for a whimsical digression and culminate, ultimately, in a long and rhythmic peroration that signals to your audience that you would not take it unkindly if they, at just about this moment, would interrupt you with vigorous and sustained applause.

A great speech is literature.

The only difference between Obama and Bush is that Obama is killing more people. He's about double the numbers now. Can you imagine if McCain had won and did precisely what Obama has done, with every speech and every political maneuver overseas? There'd be riots in the streets about the people we're killing. And yet because it's Obama, and he's better looking and better at reading the teleprompter, we let him get away with it.

It should be a matter of honour on the Left to write at least as well, without redundancy or clutter, as its adversaries.

George Orwell has written that "political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."1

He was impressed with the California governor's political skills, but for years viewed Reagan warily. "We thought he was a nut," Baker said later. "I didn't necessarily think that," he added, "but that was the line on him. Everybody said that he was." Reagan's bellicose rhetoric

I repeat: Let no one take me for a fool. But if you do, then receive me as a fool, so that I too may boast a little.

I say this so that no one will deceive you by smooth rhetoric.