Quotes About Rhetoric

Never tell a lie when you can bullshit your way through it

The Communist Manifesto as political rhetoric has an almost biblical force.

Charlatanism of some degree is indispensable to effective leadership.

Sometimes when I listen to fellow progressives, I wonder if the only lesson we took away from the '04 elections is that politics is a word game.

Everyone who ever heard him seems to have agreed that the exceeding excellence of Wilberforce's speaking ability was less in what he said than in how he said it.

advocates of opinions who attack one another in daily politics are grouped together over against their common adversary, the philosopher. When

Don't you understand? We're fighting an election here and the first rule is you can say anything you like, then deny you said it, then say it again.

Talking and eloquence are not the same to speak and to speak well are two things. A fool may talk, but a wise man speaks.

It's far more common for leftists to routinely pick up weapons and try to kill those with whom they disagree than it is for those on the other side of the ideological spectrum.

The left's anti-bullying stance is an enormous lie. It is a purposeful lie. It is a lie designed to disguise the fact that leftists are the greatest group of bullies in American history.

This type of rhetoric is all too common among secularists on the left. They paint a false dichotomy between religion and science. They say that religious people are anti-science, because science makes God irrelevant—therefore, religious people want to stop scientific progress. They point to the fact that many religious people are skeptical about the theory of evolution—as though skepticism of a scientific finding were in and of itself unscientific.

I would have said, "Why do you have to use victims to illustrate your point? Why can't you just convince me on the basis of the evidence that what you're proposing is the right solution for America?

There are almost invariably unbridgeable inconsistencies in the left's publicly stated positions that are at war with their actual fundamental principles. Your goal is to make the left admit once and for all what they believe about policy by exposing those inconsistencies.

If you force a leftist to answer why we should all give up our nice cars while the Chinese and Russians continue to dump toxic waste into the atmosphere, they will avoid.

time and again in politics, unity has been used as a club to wield against those who disagree.

It was one thing to suggest that Bush had lied America into a war for oil. It was another to speak while Obama was speaking.

You may notice when arguing with someone on the left that every time you begin to make a point, that leftist begins shouting about George W. Bush. It's like Leftist Tourette's Syndrome. "Why did Obama blow out the budget?" "BUUUUUUUSHHHH!!!!!

This is why conservatives lose. They lose because while they proclaim that Obama's signature legislation fails on the merits, raising costs and lowering access to vital services, the left surges forth with a different message: Conservatives are rotten to the core.

The left no longer makes arguments about policies' effectiveness. Their only argument is character assassination

That person already disagrees with you, and they're not going to be convinced by your words of wisdom and your sparkling rhetorical flourishes. The goal will be to destroy the leftist in as public a way as is humanly possible.

he did it by bringing on folks from the right and then suggesting that they were evil for disagreeing with him.

Era aquello un nido, una hechura de políticos, de periodistas, de tribunos, de agitadores, de ministros, y daba gusto ver con cuánto donaire rompían el cascarón los traviesos polluelos.

A man may speak very well in the House of Commons, and fail very completely in the House of Lords. There are two distinct styles requisite: I intend, in the course of my career, if I have time, to give a specimen of both.

He was naturally more eloquent, had a ready plenty of words, and sometimes, as I thought, bore me down more by his fluency than by the strength of his reasons. As