Quotes About Rhetoric

Not many Americans know Myron Magnet or his work, but they know Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Alex Jones, Lou Dobbs, and an endless stream of professional nuts and cranks who roam the internet selling conspiracies, bitterness, grievance, and anger, in search of an argument.

Part of the puzzle, surely, lies in the disconnect between official rhetoric and lived realities. Americans are constantly extolling "traditions"; litanies to family values are at the center of every politician's discourse. And yet the culture of America is extremely corrosive of family life, indeed of all traditions except those redefined as "identities" that fit in the larger patterns of distinctiveness, cooperation, and openness to innovation.

BEAUTY. The visionary authority of Childs's work resides, in part, in its lack of rhetoric. Her strict avoidance of cliché, and of anything that would make the work disjunctive, fragmented. The refusal of humor, self-mockery, flirtation with the audience, cult of personality. The distaste for the exhibitionistic: movement calling attention to itself, isolatable "effects." Beauty as, first of all, an art of refusal.

Print is the sharpest and the strongest weapon of our party.

Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?

Since words are like the color of a painting, how you organize and use them will have an effect on the discussion as a whole, choosing your words carefully is a talent that may dramatically improve your capacity to frame any discussion"

One of the most critical strengths of a superior competitor in any discipline—whether we are speaking about sports, business negotiations, or even presidential debates—is the ability to dictate the tone of the battle.

There will always be a boogie man. Politicians need one.

Joyce llevó a la prosa de ficción la precisión y la riqueza de recursos retóricos de la poesía. Supo, como había sabido Flaubert, que la poesía es lo que rescata y eleva el lenguaje de la novela.

Like most of his countrymen, he was carried away by the sound of fine words, especially if uttered by himself.

Ich bilde schon lange keine Meinungen mehr. Ich sage Dinge, weil sie besser klingen als andere, die ich ebenfalls hätte sagen können.

Then it's very easy to point fingers at other people and use this kind of rhetoric, infestation and comparing people to rodents, insects, showing them as very undesirable people - not people who feel the same, who care about their families too, no, but as people who are different and less human, to dehumanize them.

Words should be employed as the means, not the end; language is the instrument, conviction is the work.

Where you don't have people who have strong intellectual capacity, you get demagoguery.

We must admit that our opponents in this argument have a marked advantage over us. They need only a few words to set forth a half-truth; whereas, in order to show that it is a half-truth, we have to resort to long and arid dissertations.

no podía dejar de pensar en aquella frase de Adolf Hitler: «Si desea la simpatía de las masas, tiene que decirles las cosas más estúpidas y crudas.» Ese desprecio,

Who is that man moving slowly in the lonely building, stopping at intervals with an intent face? He is a rhetoric student forming a set of memory loci.

There are some who speak well and write badly. For the place and the audience warm them, and draw from their minds more than they think of without that warmth.

You can't trust politicians. It doesn't matter who makes a political speech. It's all lies - and it applies to any rock star who wants to make a political speech as well.

Hitler showed the evil that could be done by the art of rhetoric. Churchill showed how it could help to save humanity. It has been said that the difference between Hitler's speeches and Churchill's speeches was that Hitler made you think he could do anything; Churchill made you think you could do anything.

Congress is so strange. A man gets up to speak and says nothing. Nobody listens — and then everybody disagrees.

Congress is so strange. A man gets up to speak and says nothing. Nobody listens -- and then everybody disagrees.

Political aspirants make too much of the people before election, and, if successful, too much of themselves after it. They use the people when they want to rise, as we treat a spirited horse when we want to mount him;--for a time we pat the animal upon the neck, and speak him softly; but once in the saddle, then come the whip and spur.

Saul Strauss used to be what Gavin would consider committed and passionate in a namby-pamby, Kumbaya-like, eco-green, granola-y, unrealistic sort of way, but more and more, the Sauls of the world had raised their rhetoric to the dangerously hysterical