Quotes About Rhetoric

Find enough clever things to say, and you're a Prime Minister; write them down and you're a Shakespeare.

Even the revolutionary writer will err if he fails to grasp the enormous effectiveness of occasional understatement.

Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.

There are professional negotiators working for the writers and the actors, but basically you've got the writers and actors negotiating against businessmen. That's why you get rhetoric.

Trump needs to stick like glue to whomever writes his speeches and fire whomever told him Americans are up at night worried about the comfort and well-being of people who broke into our country illegally.

In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.

I always believe writing is an indispensable part of one's political armoury.

The choice word, the correct phrase, are instruments that may reach the heart, and awake the soul if they fall upon the ear in melodious cadence; but if the utterance be harsh and discordant they fail to interest, fall upon deaf ears, and are as barren as seed sown on fallow ground.

When Churchill was running for office for the first time, he went door to door to ask for votes. He knocked on the door of an irritable man who, when Churchill introduced himself, said, "Vote for you? Why, I'd rather vote for the devil!" "I understand," answered Churchill. "But in case your friend is not running, may I count on your support?

Los discursos exagerados solo sirven para encubrir afectos mediocres.

The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.

One horse-laugh is worth ten-thousand syllogisms.

If Franklin Delano Roosevelt became convinced tomorrow that coming out for cannibalism would get him the votes he needs so sorely, he would begin fattening a missionary in the White House yard come Wednesday.

You protest, and with justice, each time Hitler jails an opponent; but you forget that Stalin and company have jailed and murdered a thousand times as many. It seems to me, and indeed the evidence is plain, that compared to the Moscow brigands and assassins, Hitler is hardly more than a common Ku Kluxer and Mussolini almost a philanthropist. [In an open letter to Upton Sinclair, printed in The American Mercury, June 1936]

Reagan is described as delivering Barry Goldwater's doctrine with John F. Kennedy's technique.

CONSERVATIVES IN MODERN America face a chronic problem in running for office. Often believing government to be the enemy, they have to explain to themselves and others why they want to join that enemy.

Half of politics is image-making, the other half is the art of making people believe the image

Words used for the purpose of fighting lose their quality of speech; they become clichés. The extent to which clichés have crept into our everyday language and discussions may well indicate the degree to which we not only have deprived ourselves of the faculty of speech, but are ready to use more effective means of violence than bad books (and only bad books can be good weapons) with which to settle our arguments.

The Party program was never taken seriously by Nazi officials; they prided themselves on belonging to a movement, as distinguished from a party, and a movement could not be bound by a program. Even before the Nazis' rise to power, these Twenty-Five Points had been no more than a concession to the party system and to such prospective voters as were old-fashioned enough to ask what was the program of the party they were going to join.

No revolution, no matter how wide it opened its gates to the masses and the downtrodden—les malheureux, les misérables, les damnés de la terre as we know them from the grand rhetoric of the French Revolution—was ever started by them.

There was nothing in all Douglas's powerful effort that appealed to the higher instincts of human nature, while Lincoln always touched sympathetic cords. Lincoln's speech excited and sustained the enthusiasm of his audience to the end.

Refusing to lift sanctions and adopting tougher rhetoric toward Iran would not be partisan issues. Plenty of Democrats think that those actions are both good politics and good policy.

The thing that happens is that politicians run on tough-on-crime rhetoric. You appeal to the public and say, 'Let's put more money into taller fences, tougher laws, tougher sentencing, handcuffs,' and where does that money come from? Well, immediately, it comes out of all the money needed for corrections.

Like my colleagues, I did about 10 to 15 town hall meetings on this issue; and what I found is people came with a sincere interest to learn, a sincere interest to cut through the rhetoric and understand how this Medicare bill impacts them in their daily lives.