Quotes About Rhetoric

Most politicians have some con artist in them, but worse is the con artist who has some politician in him.

If Michael Steele doesn't make you sad, well, then there's radio host Rush Limbaugh, no longer content with wanting the President to fail, Rush is now calling out Mr. Obama as a girly man.

Not that Marcus had any problems with Mexicans, seeing as they had a common enemy in the Orange One

We are, for better or worse, the body of our republic. And we need to listen to it, to hear - beyond the pain and anger and fear, beyond the decrees and policies and the eddying of public sentiments and resentments, beyond the bombast and the rhetoric - the sound (faint at times, stronger at others) of a heartbeat going on.

No African American speaker had ever faced this kind of captive audience, composed of all the leadership of the federal government in one place; and no such speaker would ever again until Barack Obama was inaugurated president in January 2009. Douglass, a master ironist about America

The channel got switched to Fox News and a panel of experts was desperately trying to fill airtime by finding ways to rephrase the nothing that they knew, over and over again.

The mother tongue of politicians is that of ancient Babylon: a language designed to severely limit discourse within a tower of praise to elitism, a language carried on breath's reeking of the fecal matter from their paymasters

A philosopher's main task is to compulsively filibuster

Election campaigns seem to siphon away political anger and even basic political intelligence into this great vaudeville, after which we all end up in exactly the same place.

I think we now know the limits also of intelligence and rhetoric.

The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.

Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas.

Hitler repeatedly stressed that one could not get at the masses with arguments, proofs, and knowledge, but only with feelings and beliefs.

las palabras son casi siempre retóricas o excesivas o metafóricas y por lo tanto inexactas

He'll be a minister in Spain some day, or, at the very least, ambassador to Washington, he's exactly the kind of pretentious fool with just a thin veneer of cordiality that the Right produces by the dozen and which the Left reproduces and imitates whenever they're in power, as if they were the victims of some form of contagion.

La retórica es el arte de la influencia, la amistad y la elocuencia, del ingenio y la lógica irrefutable. Y emplea la más poderosa de las fuerzas sociales: la argumentación.

Arrancar lágrimas al público es fácil comparado con el objetivo número dos: hacer que decidan lo que tú quieres.

Yo dedico un capítulo entero al elegante método de Cicerón, que consta de cinco pasos para la construcción de un discurso (invención, organización, estilo, memoria y ejecución)

Este capítulo te ha ofrecido recursos básicos para determinar el resultado de una discusión: Establece tu objetivo personal. Establece tus objetivos para tu audiencia. ¿Quieres cambiar su estado de ánimo, su opinión o su disposición a realizar lo que tú desees?

La seducción es manipulación, la manipulación es la mitad de la argumentación y, por consiguiente, muchos de nosotros la rehuimos.

Useful Figure The litotes ("didn't appreciate") understates a point ironically. It has fallen out of favor in our hyperbolic times, but makes for a more sophisticated kind of speech.

utiliza la idea de tu contrincante para conseguir lo que deseas. Practica el jiu-jitsu retórico empleando los movimientos de tu rival para hacerle perder el equilibrio.

if the two of you are alone, walk away. If you have an audience, consider throwing the fallacy back at your opponent. "I see. Purple is a fruit. So, since your skin is tan, that makes you a pair of khakis.

People still love a well-delivered talk; the top professional speakers charge more per person than a Bruce Springsteen concert.