Quotes About Rhetoric

What politicians do is they never get the rhetoric wrong, and the price they pay is they don't speak the truth as they see it. Now, I will speak truth as I see it, and sometimes I don't get the rhetoric right. I think that's a fair trade-off.

UKIP trades in the language of fear and division; it seeks power in order to reject responsibility.

If Americans want to see results instead of rhetoric, if taxpayers would like solutions instead of sound bites, and hard work instead of horse trading, I suggest you take a short look, and it won't take much longer, at the accomplishments of this Congress.

Donald Trump's habit of making offensive and outlandish statements will not bring Americans together.

Since we want not emancipation from impulse but clarification of impulse, the duty of rhetoric is to bring together action and understanding into a whole that is greater than scientific perception.

A half truth, like half a brick, is always more forcible as an argument than a whole one. It carries better.

The truth is the best propaganda.

Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

The technique of infamy is to start two lies at once and get people arguing heatedly over which is the truth.

Nowhere are prejudices more mistaken for truth, passion for reason and invective for documentation than in politics.

To label family planning and legal abortion programs "genocide" is male rhetoric, for male ears.

Words have a magical power. They can bring either the greatest happiness or deepest despair; they can transfer knowledge from teacher to student; words enable the orator to sway his audience and dictate its decisions. Words are capable of arousing the strongest emotions and prompting all men's actions.

That city has changed and the United States has changed since James wrote his American novel, but dead phrases, empty rhetoric, clichéd though, as well as readymade opinions and just plain nonsense proffered to the public by the press show no sign of abating anytime soon.

We love the blather and boast, the charge and counter-charge of campaigning. Governing is a tougher deal.

His [Donald Trump] audiences love it.

The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan.

And Americans, individually, are of all people the most anxious to please. That they talk overmuch is often taken as a sign of self-satisfaction. It is merely a mannerism. Rhetoric is a thing inbred in them. They are quite unconscious of it.

They are embracing the kind of extremism personified in the past, in their different ways, by the likes of Joe McCarthy, Barry Goldwater, Strom

He's no stranger to pretty words.

The rhetoric of feminism with its emphasis on resistance, rebellion, and revolution created an illusion of militancy and radicalism that masked the fact that feminism was in no way a challenge or a threat to capitalist patriarchy.

All too frequently in the women's movement it was assumed one could be free of sexist thinking by simply adopting the appropriate feminist rhetoric; it was further assumed that identifying oneself as oppressed freed one from being an oppressor.

Much as I enjoy popular New Age commentary on love, I am often struck by the dangerous narcissism fostered by spiritual rhetoric that pays so much attention to individual self-improvement and so little to the practice of love within the context of community.

If we can just tone down the rhetoric and discuss things like rational human beings, applying justice equally and not based on some political philosophy, we will validate that phrase at the end of our Pledge of Allegiance, which advocates "justice for all.

RHETORIC The art of making life less believable; the calculated use of language, not to alarm but to do full harm to our busy minds and properly dispose our listeners to a pain they have never dreamed of. The context of what can be known establishes that love and indifference are forms of language, but the wise addition of punctuation allows us to believe that there are other harms - the dash gives the reader the clear signal they are coming.