Quotes About Rhetoric

Let arms give place to the robe, and the laurel of the warriors yield to the tongue of the orator.

Utinam tam facile vera invenire possim quam falsa convincere.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Fieri autem potest ut recte quis sentiat et id, quod sentit, polite eloqui non possit; sed mandare quemquam litteris cogitationes suas, qui eas nec disponere nec illustrare possit nec delectatione aliqua adlicere lectorem, hominis est intemperanter abutentis et otio et litteris.

All that speech-making can bloat a man up. I've watched the process, many times now. It's those kinds of words, the kind they use in speeches. They have a fermenting effect on the brain. You can see it on television, during the political broadcasts - the words coming out of their mouths like bubbles of gas.

In previous armies, soldiers used their time to clean their weapons and stock up on ammunition. Our weapons are words, and we may need our arsenal at any moment.

The enemy is not fundamentalism; it is intolerance. In this case, the intolerance is perverse since it masquerades under the "liberal" rhetoric of "equal time." But mistake it not.

Principles aren't of much account anyway, except at election time. After that you hang them up to let them season.

The best time to listen to a politician is when he's on a stump on a street corner in the rain late at night when he's exhausted. Then he doesn't lie.

People who speak with contempt for one another will probably not remain united for long. The most alarming rhetoric comes out of the dispute between liberals and conservatives, and it's a dangerous waste of time because they're both right.

Unlike criticism, contempt is particularly toxic because it assumes a moral superiority in the speaker. Contempt is often directed at people who have been excluded from a group or declared unworthy of its benefits. Contempt is often used by governments to provide rhetorical cover for torture or abuse. Contempt is one of four behaviors that, statistically, can predict divorce in married couples. People who speak with contempt for one another will probably not remain united for long.

Rhetoric worked beautifully when applied to simple things like the nature of God, but how was one to use it in the chaos of human actions?

In debate he thought high and aimed low.

Andrew Johnson. He had been lying rather low since the inauguration, yet he showed this evening that he had lost none of his talent for invective on short notice.

We find rhetorical situations everywhere in life, and only our imaginations can get us out of them.

Rhetoric takes no real account of the art in literature and morality takes no account of the art in life.

Life would die without poets, and democracy must have its spellbinders.

Public speaking is the art of diluting a two-minute idea with a two-hour vocabulary.

If I were a politician, I could prove that monkeys talk.

Most of our students are here to get the credentials they believe are central to admission to the Dream. Everyone does the rhetoric bit-Fascist pig this and that-but push them and they ask you to write recommendations for jobs with banks and insurance companies.

For the next ten days, Hillary would come at Obama, guns blazing, armed with a line that, in the context of her new persona, was so well pitched and perfectly modulated that it almost sounded like poetry.

Great powers of all persuasions care deeply about their survival, and there is always the danger in a bipolar or multipolar system that they will be attacked by another great power. In these circumstances, liberal great powers regularly dress up their hard-nosed behavior with liberal rhetoric. They talk like liberals and act like realists. Should they adopt liberal policies that are at odds with realist logic, they invariably come to regret it.

we made all the necessary rhetorical changes to make it look like we were aligning ourselves with a burgeoning democracy...

Sounding frank, honest, and sincere is, of course, a rhetorical strategy in itself, known from ancient literature as parrhesia. It's often employed by liars.