Quotes About Rhetoric

If your quest is for a truth that defies rhetoric, perhaps you ought to study political economy or systems analysis and abandon Shakespeare to the aesthetes and the groundlings, who combined to elevate him in the first place.

When critics surrender to the prevailing orthodoxy, the author says they adopt the rhetoric of an occupied country, one that expects no liberation from liberation.

Good style, clear argument, but you're not saying anything.

Fatal ist mir das Lumpenpack, Das, um die Herzen zu rühren, Den Patriotismus trägt zur Schau Mit allen seinen Geschwüren.

Our friends at the Republican convention were more than happy to talk about everything they think is wrong with America, but they didn't have much to say about how they'd make it right. They want your vote, but they don't want you to know their plan.

The Right is incredibly deft at getting earnest about all the wrong things.

If two wrongs don't make a right, then what do three wrongs make? What about four?

Even when candidates have degrees from Harvard and Yale, they try to run as the candidate of the common man.

The fascists in most Latin American countries tell the people that the reason their wages will not buy as much in the way of goods is because of Yankee imperialism. The fascists in Latin America learn to speak and act like natives.

There is no war on coal. Period. There are more coal jobs and more coal produced in Ohio than there were five years ago, in spite of the talking points and the yard signs.

As a matter of fact, I didn't make a political speech outside of my state for 20 years.

I tend to be one who just speaks from my soul, and so what comes out sometimes is rather harsh. In that sense, I'm very much a part of the tradition of a Frederick Douglass or a Malcolm X who used hyperbolic language at times to bring attention to the state of emergency.

Reaping political dividends out of tragedies is deeply engrained in the Congress' DNA.

Much speech is one thing, well-timed speech is another.

Because a thing is eloquently expressed it should not be taken to be as necessarily true; nor because it is uttered with stammering lips should it be supposed false.

PotÄ™ga frazesu byÅ'a i jest w Polsce arcypotÄ™gÄ…. DziaÅ'a ona na mózg polski zupeÅ'nie tak, jak du?a butla spirytusu.

People write or speak sentences in order to produce an effect, and the success of a sentence is measured by the degree to which the desired effect has been achieved.

If you can talk brilliantly about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered.

Courtiers of all ages feel one great need: to speak in such a way that they do not say anything.

The Victorians did not have some secret formula, since lost, about how to expect the best of marriage and still put up with the worst. Rather, they were much more accepting than we are today of a huge gap between rhetoric and reality, expectation and actual experience. In large part, this was because they had no other choice.

Truth becomes untruth if uttered by your enemy

Truth persuades by teaching, but does not teach by persuading.

Politics determines who has the power, not who has the truth.

Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same lies.