Quotes About Rhetoric

Weak leadership will always hide behind ambiguity and rhetoric.

If you wish the sympathy of the broad masses, you must tell them the crudest and most stupid things.

Bahram smiled to himself as he listened: the arguments were marvellously simple yet irrefutable. Really, there was no language like English for turning lies into legalisms.

These are sentiments generally associated with women, children, and savages, according to Le Bon. It's not an accident that when Republicans of all stripes—Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, and Christine O'Donnell—choose an epithet for Democrats, it's to call them women. Everyone sees it: Democrats are a mob.

Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards used to claim that there are "two Americas," the rich and the poor. If Democrats have their way, there will be two Latin Americas, both of them poor. You're living in one of them right now.

Only the Democratic Party could lyingly claim credit for the Civil Rights Act—supported by more Republicans than Democrats—while having a former Klansman as their senior senator.

The Democrats never particularly cared for Americans, so they needed to bring in new people. Immigration is the advance wave of left-wing, Third World colonization of America. Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards used to claim that there are "two Americas," the rich and the poor. If Democrats have their way, there will be two Latin Americas, both of them poor. You're living in one of them right now.

Trump-era rules: violence is speech and speech is violence.

While the other candidates were memorizing all the countries in NATO, practicing their pronunciations of Arabic names, and learning the geography of Syria, Trump shut to the top of the polls with an opening speech about Mexico sending rapists and drugs to our country. Do not mistake me for a politician of nuance-- I'm going to tell you the truth.

Politics for liberals is: Our mass against their mass. Except conservatives don't have a mass; liberals do. (But enough about Michael Moore.) This

a person bound to the facts can never hope to best the rabble-rouser in the arena.

APHÆRESIS  (APHÆ'RESIS)   n.s.[   figure in grammarthat takes away a letter or syllable from the beginning of a word.

APOPHASIS  (APO'PHASIS)   n.s.[Lat.    a denying.] A figure in rhetorick, by which the orator, speaking ironically, seems to wave what he would plainly insinuate; as, Neither will I mention those things, which if I should, you notwithstanding could neither confute or speak against them.Smith'sRhetorick.

APORIA  (APO'RIA) n.s. [a figure in rhetorick, by which the speaker shews, that he doubts where to begin for the multitude of matter, or what to say in some strange and ambiguous thing; and doth, as it were, argue the case with himself. Thus Cicero says, Whether he took them from his fellows more impudently, gave them to a harlot more lasciviously, removed them from the Roman people more wickedly, or altered them more presumptuously, I cannot well declare. Smith's Rhetorick.

ANASTROPHE  (ANA'STROPHE)   n.s.[  a preposterous placing, from    figure whereby words which should have been precedent, are postponed.

ANTIPHRASIS  (ANTI'PHRASIS)   n.s.[from    against, and uq  a form of speech.]The use of words in a sense opposite to their proper meaning. You now find no cause to repent, that you never dipt your hands in the bloody high courts of justice, so called only by antiphrasis.South'sDedication to hisSermons.

It is a world not of angels but of angles, where men speak of moral principles but act on power principles; a world where we are always moral and our enemies always immoral;

Odd that mankind's benefactors should be amusing people. In America at least this is often the case. Anyone who wants to govern the country has to entertain

Political realists see the world as it is: an arena of power politics moved primarily by perceived immediate self-interests, where morality is rhetorical rationale for expedient action and self-interest.

muitas vezes, quem sai vencedor de uma disputa deve sua vitória não tanto à correção de seu julgamento na exposição de sua tese, mas, antes, à astúcia e habilidade com que a defendeu.

People who have good arguments use them. People who do not have good arguments try to win by labeling.

When Trump said he would deport millions of undocumented immigrants who were otherwise obeying the law, his critics saw it as the beginning of a Hitler-like roundup of the people who are "different" in some way. I saw it as a thoroughly impractical idea that served as a mental "anchor" to brand Trump as the candidate who cared the most about our porous borders and planned to do the most about them.

Word-thinking is a term I invented to describe a situation in which people are trying to win an argument by adjusting the definition of words. In these situations there is no appeal to reason. But that's okay, because facts and logic are not persuasive anyway. Word-thinking usually happens when people are bad at logic but don't realize it.

lawyer by training, Kajevic had the same talent as Hitler, making his gargantuan self-importance a proxy for his country's and his rantings the voice of his people's long-suppressed rage.