Quotes About Rhetoric

All talk, talk, talk - no action or results. Sad.

The art of those who govern consists above all in the science of employing words.

Politics is not a science...but an art.

When a politician says, concerning an issue involving science, that the debate is over, you may be sure the debate is rolling on and not going swimmingly for his side.

Charm is a way of getting the answer 'Yes' without asking a clear question.

The smile of a politician is strong and friendly, but noncommittal.

Every communist has a fascist frown, every fascist a communist smile.

Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society.

A boxing movie without clichés is like a political campaign without lies.

Demagoguery is the ability to dress minor ideas with major words.

Lincoln characterized Stephen Douglas's argument as a specious and fantastic arrangement of words, by which a man can prove a horse chestnut to be a chestnut horse.

The Allied rhetoric about self-determination of peoples did not apply to African or Asian colonies, or to Arab territories known to have oil.

It is like this in a city-state; the demagogues thrive by throwing the state into discord.

right wing's most common techniques—including the deceptive use of statistics.

You can tell a paragraph is slipping out of control when there's a runaway use of the word 'hence.

It is the oldest ironies that are still the most satisfying: man, when preparing for bloody war, will orate loudly and most eloquently in the name of peace.

you don't get far in political discourse with counterfactual arguments that "it would have been even worse.

We form many of our political opinions through reading papers and unconsciously absorbing the rhetoric of the journalists. Later, we spout the same opinions as our own. This parallels the way we respond to any authority and its something politicians understand well.

Professor Kimberle Crenshaw saw the dilemma a dozen years ago, but concluded that as long as race consciousness thrives, blacks will have to rely on rights rhetoric to protect their interests.16 There are, though, limited options to those deemed the Other in making specific demands for inclusion and equality. Doing so in the quest for racial justice, though, means that "winning and losing have been part of the same experience.

A good portion of speaking will consist in knowing how to lie.

Politics is now synonymous with hypocrisy

Nationalism is a phenomenon of the world after the 1789 French Revolution; it implies a common consciousness created within a consolidated territory, usually involving a single language and shared culture, producing a public rhetoric of a single national will, and with the agenda of creating or reinforcing a unitary state.

'Yes' is a far more potent word than 'no' in American politics. By adopting the positions which animate the political agenda for the other side, one can disarm them and leave them sputtering with nothing to say.

Hyperbole was to Lyndon Johnson what oxygen is to life.