Quotes About Rhetoric

It would be awesome to be so impressive that we could sway people to our way of thinking just by declaiming our thoughts, but probably most of us lack such gravitas. Luckily, there's something even better: evidence, logic, and argument.

Logic is like the sword - those who appeal to it, shall perish by it.

Our swords shall play the orators for us.

If you add up all the promises any politician makes, the math doesn't work. Hillary Clinton's math doesn't work; Donald's math probably doesn't work. I think you have to listen to their campaign pitches more as symbolic, more as metaphors.

Syntax, my lad. It has been restored to the highest place in the republic.

Those who possess the strongest reasoning and who best order their thoughts in order to make them clear and intelligible can always best persuade others of what they are proposing, even if they were to speak only Low Breton and had never learned rhetoric.

At the dinner table, and with coffee in the office afterwards, Wolfe resumed on the subject he had started at lunch—Voltaire. The big question was, could a man be called great on account of the way he used words, even though he was a toady, a trimmer, a forger, and an intellectual fop.

It was a day when I was preparing a speech to be delivered in praise of the Emporor; there would be a lot of lies in the speech and they would be applauded by those who knew that they were lies." The Confessions of St. Augustine

The arguments themselves did not appear to me to be any better simply because they were better expressed; eloquence did not make them true." St. Augustine page 85

Reagan kept saying the deficit was Public Enemy Number One. But then he sent up a budget that would have pumped red ink up over the window sills.

Lincoln learned to summon the passions, but he never addressed his audience as sweethearts.

As with almost every long oration, there were loose ends.

Eloquence is vehement simplicity.

Aristotle got tired of hearing lousy arguments in the marketplace and the assembly. So he decided to develop reasoning templates to apply to arguments in order to analyze them for validity.

If you paid me for work, continued Max, whose rhetoric was more sophisticated than you might expect from a man with food in his beard, I wouldn't have to feel worthless. There's not law says old people have to feel worthless all the while, you know. You paid me, I'd have some dignity. Now it was Mile's turn to nod and smile agreeably. I think the dignity ship set sail a long time ago, Dad.

In these difficult years, America has suffered from a fever of words: from inflated rhetoric that promises more than it can deliver; from angry rhetoric that fans discontents into hatreds; from bombastic rhetoric that postures instead of persuading.

A confused and weak man hides his weakness and uncertainty with fiery speeches.

In politics, if you're explaining, you're loosing.

The best measure of a politician's electoral success was becoming not how successfully he could broker people's desires, but how well he could tap their fears.

The scalding rhetoric of the "pro-life" movement seems to propose the derivative claim that a fetus is from the moment of its conception a full moral person with rights and interests equal in importance to those of any other member of the moral community. But very few people—even those who belong to the most vehemently anti-abortion groups—actually believe that, whatever they say.

While a truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power.

There is no power like oratory. Caesar controlled men by exciting their fears, Cicero by . . . swaying their passions. The influence of the one perished; that of the other continues to this day.

If words can be lethal weapons, I must provide them with an arsenal.

The implication strongly is that Osama bin Laden is a Hitler, even though he has no state power at all. It's just grotesque if you seriously think about it.