Quotes About Rhetoric

I tell you folks, all politics is applesauce.

Liberty doesn't work as well in practice as it does in speeches.

Liberty don't work as good in practice as it does in speeches.

If pro is the opposite of con, what is the opposite of Congress?

Liberty doesn't work as well in practice as it does in speeches.

False eloquence is exaggeration; true eloquence is emphasis.

Politicians become statesmen, not by honoring pious shibboleths, nor even by moving [people] to action with inspiring rhetoric, but by recognizing and then resolving the central dilemmas of their age.

In 2009, Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda's second-in-command, declared: 'He [Obama] is trying to say: "Do not hate us … but we will continue to kill you".

He (Cicero) made Catiline and his conspiracy actually simple; the man himself had the courage to sit in front of him and listen, and at the end, it seemed as if he had exposed Catiline even to himself.

A good debater is not necessarily an effective vote-getter: you can find a hole in your opponent's argument through which you could drive a coach and four ringing jingle bells all the way, and thrill at the crystallization of a truth wrung out from a bloody dialogue - which, however, may warm only you and your muse, while the smiling paralogist has in the meantime made votes by the tens of thousands.

Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.

A speech is something you say so as to distract attention from what you do not say.

"Any man who makes a speech more than six times a year is bound to repeat himself, not because he has little to say, but because he wants applause and the old stuff gets it"

Of all eloquence a nickname is the most concise; of all arguments the most unanswerable.

One has no notion of him [William Cobbett] as making use of a fine pen, but a great mutton-fist; his style stuns readers…. He is too much for any single newspaper antagonist; "lays waste" a city orator or Member of Parliament, and bears hard upon the government itself. He is a kind of fourth estate in the politics of the country.

To write a genuine familiar or truly English style, is to write as any one would speak in common conversation who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force, and perspicuity, setting aside all pedantic and oratorical flourishes.

If you want to convince someone, target their System 1 with narrative, not their System 2 with facts and data.

It was a city built on promise, on compromise, on inspiration and empty rhetoric both, on history poorly remembered and easily bent, and once in a while, on good people with the best of intentions who battled against the distrust, misdirection, and deceit that was politics as usual. (Referring to Washington, D.C.)

Their message is conveyed in that hortatory tone and declamatory voice used by politicians when starting a condition contrary to fact. People who aren't cowed don't spend a lot of time proclaiming they won't be cowed. Leaders who really have strengthened the voice of freedom don't don't need to reassure there electorates that they're committed to doing so.

The men who rule have practiced keepin' their tongues still, not exercisin' them. So you want to drop the orator idea unless you mean to go into politics just to perform the skyrocket act.

The power which has always started the greatest religious and political avalanches in history rolling has from time immemorial been the magic power of the spoken word, and that alone. The broad masses of the people can be moved only by the power of speech.

I suppose every government that has ever gone to war has tried to convince its people of three things: (1) that right is on its side; (2) that it is fighting purely in defence of the nation; (3) that it is sure to win.

I have always found the word 'Europe' in the mouths of those politicians who wanted from other powers something they did not dare to demand in their own name. Otto von Bismarck We

At this point, it is important to bear in mind that the Jesuits were the intellectuals of the Catholic world. Trained in classical rhetoric and techniques of disputation, Jesuits had learned the Americans' languages primarily so as to be able to argue with them, to persuade them of the superiority of the Christian faith. Yet they regularly found themselves startled and impressed by the quality of the counterarguments they had to contend with.