Quotes About Rhetoric

They spoke of training public speakers under five traditional headings: inventio, seeking out ideas or lines of argument; collocatio, structure and organization; elocutio, diction and style; actio, physical delivery; and memoria, memory (speeches could last for hours and as they were spoken not read they had to be learned by heart).

Cicero was nothing if not a genius at character assassination.

One of these was Philo of Larisa, head of the Academy in Athens, founded by Plato three hundred years before. He inspired Cicero with a passion for philosophy, and in particular for the theories of Skepticism, which asserted that knowledge of the nature of things is in the nature of things unattainable. Such ideas were well judged to appeal to a student of rhetoric who had learned to argue all sides of a case.

On election season politicos dawn their timber boots and red handkerchiefs. Many claim salt of the earth roots every time they eat a watermelon, but they never bite the bitterness of the rind. Everyone likes a good show and the politics of poverty never disappoint.

Although I often find that the feminist rhetoric - not feminism - can come across as simple-minded, self-regarding, nuance-averse and reductive - biology to physiology, history to psychology, procreation to gynecology, and so on - I have come to realize that we should all be feminists.

Do we seek delicate phraseology in politics or other forms of public life? We do not.

What we all want is public safety. We don't want rhetoric that's framed through ideology.

I think President Obama has used the bully pulpit as a way to attack capitalism.

I call the language of political figures, pundits and administrators 'the haute couture of language.'

Nobody understood how to use television for his own purposes better than Nixon, despite his poor showing against John F. Kennedy in the televised presidential debate.

Those who criticize Putin are not human: they are my personal enemies.

Vladimir Putin has to create foreign enemies, and he also has to justify... he has to claim... he can't acknowledge that there's a legitimate protest against his authoritarian rule, so he's got to blame it on Hilary Clinton.

Populism, literally, means speaking for 'the people.' In practice it means demagoguery.

If there's a major foreign policy event, the President gets on TV, the Congress doesn't.

No matter the candidate, every detail in a campaign is carefully and strategically framed for our consumption. The devil is in them.

It is not empty rhetoric to talk of the Free World.

You'd think we'd be exhausted by that rhetoric but you're still able to move people with fear and fright and lies that somebody's going to take your place, that in order for someone to rise, you have to fall.

We must bring the rule of law to its full fruition in the United States, and when we do, we will have achieved the goals and rhetoric of our Founding Fathers.

Panurge stood beside the galley with an oar in his hand, not to help the herdsmen but to prevent from from somehow clambering aboard and thus escaping their death, and all the while preached to them eloquently . . . with rhetorical flourishes about the miseries of this world and the blessings of the next, affirming that those who had passed on to that place were happier than those who lived on in this vale of tears.

He was a big talker, someone who liked words for words' sake, the sound of them, the way you can pile them up in your mouth and make a poem if you speill them out the right way. p92

How many others suffered in silence, too ashamed and too afraid to speak about their pain? The world wouldn't let them grieve for children they had aborted. How could they when the rhetoric said there was no child? How does one grieve what doesn't exist? No one wanted to admit the truth.

Republicans stand for raw, unbridled evil and greed and ignorance smothered in balloons and ribbons.

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.

The extremely effective rhetorical methods you constantly used, at least for my instruction, were curses, threats, sarcasm, mocking laughter and – curiously enough – self-pity.