Quotes About Rhetoric

The next time a news outlet complains about the state of our political rhetoric or the uninformed U.S. voter, we should promptly point them to the video of Ashley Parker raucous in a Polish cemetery or Philip Rucker's diatribes on party invitations.

A problem with a president who leads by stirring the moral sentiments of voters is that he has got to keep stirring them.

Trump might have a populist message that resonates with some voters, but the man doesn't care about any of the people he's appealing to.

The Left relies upon the politics of fantasy to tempt voters.

Barack Obama may have found the answer to his biggest rhetorical challenge: When millions of voters are unemployed or underemployed, how does a president simultaneously sound realistic and optimistic?

Vice presidents are at times tasked with issuing direct broadsides against enemies while the top guy stays above the fray. But never before has a vice president served as an attack dog against his own party's voters.

In 2008 all the stars aligned perfectly for Obama's 6-point victory over John McCain. He was an inexperienced, untested neophyte, and successfully convinced enough voters to paint their own version of what hope-and-change was all about on the blank canvas he provided.

As the 2016 presidential race kicks off, candidates on both sides of the aisle are promising to stand up for the middle class. Voters deserve to know that anyone who champions Obamacare cannot honestly say she or he is also a champion of middle-class Americans.

Trump's divisive rhetoric targets low-information voters and won't play well with the general public, either.

Rubio's supporters must believe rank-and-file Republican voters are really stupid - or so desperate they can be persuaded that up is down, a leopard can change its spots, and a dozen bilingual unicorns will lead off Rubio's inaugural parade.

The French elites' strategy of trying to defeat the Le Pens by aping their rhetoric, stealing their policies, and pandering to their voters has been a political and moral failure.

We live in an 'eventocracy'. This is a new form of democracy where there is nothing greater than the event. Any policy announcement has so many events that people have begun to believe in the arrival of an avatar.

Using his gift for fundamentalist rhetoric and adroitly manipulating the religious indoctrination Elizabeth had received since she was old enough to talk, Mitchell cowed the girl into becoming an utterly submissive polygamous concubine—buttressing his powers of theological persuasion with threats to kill her and her family.

Politicians, singers, and preachers are in the same business, using sound to move hearts and change minds.

There's an old Internet adage that as soon as you compare something to the Nazis you lose the argument.

I love the way you talk. You just let it flow from you as if you own all the words in the world. They're your personal property and you make them dance for you.

Politicans] are salespeople. Instead of rotisserie ovens they are selling this idea of preemptive war or social-security reforms.

He'd inspired Perry to devise a theory of how all religion worked: Along comes a leader who's uninhibited enough to use everyday words in a new and strong and counterintuitive way, which emboldens the people around him to use this rhetoric themselves, and the very act of using it creates sensations unlike anything they're used to in everyday life;

It is a fact, indeed, that most of the great teachers of mankind have been not writers but speakers. Think of Pythagoras, Christ, Socrates, the Buddha, and so on. And since I have spoken of Socrates, I would like to say something about Plato. I remember Bernard Shaw said that Plato was the dramatist who invented Socrates

La belleza es ese misterio hermoso que no descifran ni la psicología ni la retórica.

By failing to read or listen to poets, society dooms itself to inferior modes of articulation, those of the politician, the salesman or the charlatan.

The Latin name for the fallacy of appealing to an illegitimate authority or expert is argumentum ad verecundiam, which means "argument to shame.

It's an election year. We would prefer that voters didn't use common sense.

He has a splendid repertoire of 500 words. Why does he insist on using only 150?