Quotes About Rhetoric

Bush is the Liberace of Cuban politics. He knows how to play us. He says every single thing they want to hear.

The Democrats' ads convince me that Governor Romney can't sing, but his record convinces me he knows how to lead, and I think you know which skill we need more.

Some politicians that I've seen have been brilliant with the public. They almost speak with the skill of an actor.

I don't have any oratory skills. But I would not use them if I had.

Yes, we have an innate tendency to think in us and them categories, but we look to the leader to help us know who the us is and who the them is. The leader can define who is in and who is out... When the leader draws the circle in an exclusionary way, with the rhetoric of hostility, the sense of threat among the followers is heightened. When the rhetoric is expansive and inclusionary, the threat is reduced.

catachresis

Sir Thomas More came up with absurdity, acceptance, exact, explain, and exaggerate.

He sold Syria way better than he sold this.

Eloquence is a painting of the thoughts.

Eloquence.— We need both what is pleasing and what is real, but that which pleases must itself be drawn from the true.

The tone of voice influences the wisest of us and alters the force of a speech or a poem.

Eloquence.—It requires the pleasant and the real; but the pleasant must itself be drawn from the true.

Eloquence. There must be elements both pleasing and real, but what is pleasing must itself be drawn from what is true.

L'art de persuader consiste autant en celui d'agréer qu'en celui de convaincre, tant les hommes se gouvernent plus par caprice que par raison.

When Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un amped up the rhetoric, he was warned, "Twitter could get us into a war.

The president maintained his upbeat rhetoric in the early weeks of the virus had been deliberate. "I wanted to always play it down," Trump told me, as I reported earlier in this book. "I still like playing it down, because I don't want to create a panic.

In that case we must say that rhetoric is any adornment or inflation of speech which is not done for a particular effect but for a general impressiveness.

Rhetoric is simply the use of language to persuade, and it can be used to persuade us of falsehoods as well as truths.

Dean Philip Hinckler was prone to semi-sentences that expired, half-finished, in rhetorical cul-de-sacs.

Pero yo te miro de frente porque no te juzgo. No te mato a ti sino a tus actos, al eco de tus actos, su resonar lejano en las costas griegas. Se habla ya tanto de ti que eres como una vasta nube de palabras, un juego de espejos, una reiteración de fábula inasible. Tal es al menos el lenguaje de mis retóricos.

A cada sucesiva derrota hay un acercamiento a la mutación final, y que el hombre no es sino que busca ser, proyecta ser, manoteando entre palabras y conducta y alegría salpicada de sangre y otras retóricas como esta.

Miserable Aristotle, who gave them dialectics! He gave them the art of building in order to tear down, an art of slippery speech and crude arguments . . . which rejects everything and deals with nothing.15

I know three people who are interested in politics. Tell me, what has politics to do with truth, goodness and beauty?

What we all want is public safety. We don't want rhetoric that's framed through ideology.