Quotes About Rhetoric

Those on the right can do what those on the left talk about," Nixon replied.

All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies.

When I became thoroughly acquainted with the Greek and Roman authors, I thought it incumbent upon me to do something towards the honor of the place of my nativity, and to vindicate the rhetoric of this ancient forum of our Metropolis from the aspersions of the illiterate by composing A Treatise of the Alercation of the Ancients; wherein I have demonstrated that the purity, sincerity, and simplicity of their diction is nowhere so well preserved as amongst my neighbourhood.

Going into the Republican Party National Convention, in all objective truth, our non?winning front?runners are the sorriest collection of stuffed shirts, empty suits, self?gratulatory ignorami, and outright wig?flipped ding?dongs in the history of the Republic.

Compared to the way in which final causality has – in actual practice, if not in theory and rhetoric – maintained its grip on biological thinking, the Darwinian "revolution" is a trivial blip on the continued silent and unacknowledged hegemony of Aristotle.

There's a nastiness out there that wants to harm me with words. These are my enemies - the ideologues, the populists, the columnists who don't like the fact that I take them on toe-to-toe. What I try to do is tell the truth. It's not the coin of the realm in politics.

If science depended on rhetoric and polls, we would still be burning objects with phlogiston and navigating with geocentric maps. [Criticizing Richard Dawkins]

The politician is ... trained in the art of inexactitude. His words tend to be blunt or rounded, because if they have a cutting edge they may later return to wound him.

Surely: the adverb of a man without an argument.

HYPERBOLE IS THE BEST THING EVER!

I now knew a method of speaking and writing that—by means of a refined vocabulary, stately and thoughtful pacing, a determined arrangement of arguments, and a formal orderliness that wasn't supposed to fail—sought to annihilate the interlocutor to the point where he lost the will to object.

the judge Don Achille speaks up, with sly and devastating irony, saying that the whole history of mankind is the history of rhetoric: that is, the history of moving masses of people by words, words, words. That is all there is in Political Life Under Compulsion. Words are not troves of truth or bands of friendship. They are tools, and the people who use them are tools, and so are the people upon whom they are used.

asyndeton (absence of conjunction) is normally equivalent to syndeton (use of the conjunction and).

He's suffering from Politician's Logic. Something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do it.

A liar has to hire the bluffers to build the crowd and make them raise slogan and clap loud in the favour of his speech and seeing all this, the duffers join them as his supporters.

There are two effective ways to be a prolific public speaker. One is to think others are fools as most politicians do and the other is to think oneself not appearing fool even when one is as some do.

Mix and knead together all the state business as you do for your sausages. To win the people, always cook them some savory that pleases them.

A demagogue must be neither an educated nor an honest man; he has to be an ignoramus and a rogue.

To make the worse appear the better reason.

You [demagogues] are like the fishers for eels; in still waters they catch nothing, but if they thoroughly stir up the slime, their fishing is good; in the same way it's only in troublous times that you line your pockets.

Rhetoric is useful because things that are true and things that are just have a natural tendency to prevail over their opposites, so that if the decisions of judges are not what they ought to be, the defeat must be due to the speakers themselves, and they must be blamed accordingly.

Rhetoric is useful because truth and justice are in their nature stronger than their opposites; so that if decisions be made, not in conformity to the rule of propriety, it must have been that they have been got the better of through fault of the advocates themselves: and this is deserving reprehension.

For it is not true, as some treatise-mongers lay down in their systems, of the probity of the speaker, that it contributes nothing to persuasion; but moral character nearly, I may say, carries with it the most sovereign efficacy in making credible.

Of means of persuading by speaking there are three species: some consist in the character of the speaker; others in the disposing the hearer a certain way; others in the thing itself which is said, by reason of its proving, or appearing to prove the point.