Quotes About Rhetoric

I've been dealing with politicians all my life. They are all talk, no action.

Life in general has never been even close to fair, so the pretense that the government can make it fair is a valuable and inexhaustible asset to politicians who want to expand government.

This is the rhetoric of the Spirit of God' he said, 'to extenuate evil things, and to amplify good things: if a cross comes to make the cross but little, but if there is a mercy to make the mercy great.

It does bear emphasis that slippery-slope arguments are notoriously invalid.

Some of the same rhetoric used by the law-and-order crowd has been used by authoritarian states over and over again.

One of the most difficult speeches to prepare is an address to a graduation class, which is why I don't often do them.

No word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause. —Mark Twain

But [Ben Marcus] can't resist the urge to re-enact the great prizefights of the past--Kerouac vs. Capote, Barth vs. Gardner--as if what we really need, in 2005, is two white male writers fighting over something that can't be circumscribed, much less owned. Isn't it time we allowed the scorched-earth rhetoric of avant-gardes and ancien régimes to drift, like the tissue-thin sheets of an old aerogramme, into the dustbin of history?

In the twenty-first century, rank-and-file Republicans attack their enemies as the puppets of the billionaire George Soros while rank-and-file Democrats attack their enemies as the puppets of the billionaires Charles and David Koch. We're told that only the fringe believes in the Enemy Above, yet tales of his machinations have become a routine part of partisan politics. The Devil's cleverest trick is to persuade you that hardly anyone believes he exists.

They were too steeped in Hitler's rhetoric, too cowardly, too implicated in the horrors of his war to reject him.

Ä°deoloji, doÄŸas? gereÄŸi etkin düÅŸünceye de, etkin duyguya da çekici gelmez. Ä°nsan? ya heyecanland?ran ya da uyutan hap gibidir. Hitler, Mein Kampfda (Kavgam'da) halk? toplay?p galeyana getirmek için en elveriÅŸli zaman?n, insanlar?n yorgun ve etkilenmeye aç?k olduÄŸu akÅŸam saatleri olduÄŸunu söylerken bu noktay? aç?kça gördüÄŸünü belirtiyordu.

Churchill's great trick—one he had demonstrated before, and would demonstrate again—was his ability to deliver dire news and yet leave his audience feeling encouraged and uplifted.

Even the language used by Hitler and party officials was weirdly inverted. The term "fanatical" became a positive trait. Suddenly

Deploying flattery leavened with irony, he began:

These are the only genuine ideas: the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce. He who does not really feel himself lost, is without remission; that is to say, he never finds himself, never comes up against his own reality.

declared Mr Marrable magniloquently;

One of the hallmarks of our politics now is that we tend to elect those who can campaign over those who can lead;

The crusader's voice is the voice of the crowd and must rise louder all the time, for there is, of course, the other side to be drowned out. Worse, the voices of most crowds sound alike. Worse still, the voice that seeks to do other than communicate when it makes a noise has something brutal about it; it is no longer using words as words but as something to brandish, with which to threaten, brag or condemn.

He is one of those orators of whom it was well said, "Before they get up, they do not know what they are going to say; when they are speaking, they do not know what they are saying; and when they have sat down, they do not know what they have said.

ad hominem attack

Palabras pulcramente escogidas; frases de cuidada estructura; acumulación argumental; empleo de la analogía; despliegue de excentricidades... Esos son los cinco mimbres retóricos del mayor orador de su generación.

In politics there is nothing simpler than simply talking, and nothing more complicated than simply acting.

Because the people are ignorant, stupid, and easy to manipulate," Skellen finished the sentence, after he had himself a sneeze. "You need only 'Hurrah!' and make a speech from the senate steps promising to open the prisons and cut the taxes." "You are absolutely right, Owl," said the syllable stretcher. "Now I know why you shout so loudly for democracy.

Comrade, your statement is factually incorrect." "Yes, it is. But it is politically correct." (The Rise of Political Correctness)