Quotes About Rhetoric

Methods include cutting others off, overstating your facts, speaking in absolutes, changing subjects, or using directive questions to control the conversation.

It was a mistake to speak one's mind at any time, unless it perfectly matched your political purpose; and it never did. Best to strip all statements of real content, this was the basic law of diplomacy.

Exergasia' means 'use of different phrases to express the same idea,' 'synathroesmus' means 'accumulation by enumeration,' and 'incrementum' means 'piling up points to make an argument.' So listing them does all three, yes?

All I was capable of, even deep in misery, was rhetoric and belles-lettres, it was all talk.

Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This claim is rhetorical nonsense.

Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

Moral capitalism is possible; if not, its strictures are only a kind of misleading vanity, the rhetoric of a secular piety.

Men of immeasurable greatness are tossed about in the ebb and flow of words.

Politicians are a bit like musicians, and the instrument they play on is the human emotional and biochemical system. They give a speech, and there is a wave of fear in the country. They tweet, and there is an explosion of hatred.

Whenever politicians start talking in mystical terms, beware.

In medieval Europe, logic, grammar and rhetoric formed the educational core, while the teaching of mathematics seldom went beyond simple arithmetic and geometry. Nobody studied statistics. The undisputed monarch of all sciences was theology.

The change in rhetoric has constituted a revolution in how people view themselves and how they view the middle class, the Bourgeois Revaluation. People have become tolerant of markets and innovation.

People are fed up with the politics where candidates just rip each other apart and then the voters lose in the end because no one really knows what anybody stands for.

Politics is still crucially important. Our choices are vital, and we've got to make them, and not just say, 'Oh, they're all the same.' They are all the same in certain ways, alas -- a political animal is such an animal. But lurking somewhere behind their rhetoric and their spittle are important choices that we should make.

When you are guaranteed you will win, you can take very inflammatory, very extreme positions. If you have to run in a district where where you might lose, you will move to the center. That is the beauty of the two party system in America as opposed to the parliamentary system in Europe.

The only difference I ever found between the Democratic leadership and the Republican leadership is that one of them is skinning you from the ankle up and the other, from the ear down.

If a group of people - leaders - can convince a group of folk who barely have a pot to piss in that the rich shouldn't be taxed-- THAT is leadership!

I am learning by the week, but my poesy is still not my own. New rhyme, new me me me in words. I am not all this carven rhetoric.

By the skillful and sustained use of propaganda, one can make a people see even heaven as hell or an extremely wretched life as paradise.

The result always mattered more than the rhetoric.

He did what good lawyers always do. He shifted his argument in the direction his audience was already going.

Purple prose attracts attention more than converts.

His sentences didn't seem to have any verbs, which was par for a politician. All nouns, no action.