Quotes About Rhetoric

It's a bully speech," encouraged Roosevelt in reply.

What government, anywhere in the world, will happily envisage its subjects learning to free themselves from governmental and state rhetoric and pressures? Passionate loyalty and subjection to group pressure is what every state relies on. Some, of course, more than others.

To reflect that it is nearly always those leaders who claim to be in the forefront of progress, enlightenment, etc. who are the most ready to invoke blood, does offer the pleasures of irony.

The whole of the Trivium was, in fact, intended to teach the pupil the proper use of the tools of learning.

There is the natural liar...Always says the thing that sounds best.

He's like all the rest of these people; they make inflammatory speeches of enormous length, solely for political purposes, and then wish they hadn't.

When the president during the campaign said he was against nation building, I didn't realize he meant our nation.

The sophist is basically philosophy's fascist, which is why, with him, there can only be war.

I passionately believe that's it's not just what you say that counts, it's also how you say it - that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it.

Politics has got too personal, too nasty, in Britain, as it has in America.

Good argument is intended to persuade another.

It was said that Mr. Gladstone could persuade most people of most things, and himself of anything.

I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words.

Character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion.

Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. This is not a function of any other art.

People need the financial sector to be safe; people also need the financial sector to go through a massive phase of innovation. That means delivering on the positive rhetoric, like around settlement accounts, not allowing Open Banking to be diluted, and leading the way on AML.

The American people want to pay attention to serious ideas again. Our founding was built by people who were political philosophers, and we need to get back to that, away from this kind of cheap political rhetoric of Right and Left.

One of the most overused phrases in political commentary is that someone is running a 'negative' campaign filled with 'attack' ads.

Trump starts out by saying, 'We need to build walls; we need to do this.' He's very bombastic in what he's saying and his approach to the world.

Behind a smoke screen of high-profile female appointees and soothing slogans, George W. Bush is waging war on women.

The Democratic Party opposes tax cuts but it cannot say so publicly. Thus, it is forced to support the idea of lowering the tax burden but using class warfare rhetoric to dispute the allocation of the relief.

When we walk away from global warming, Kyoto, when we are irresponsibly slow in moving toward AIDS in Africa, when we don't advance and live up to our own rhetoric and standards, we set a terrible message of duplicity and hypocrisy.

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.

In 1800, in the first interparty contest, the Federalists warned that presidential candidate Thomas Jefferson, because of his sympathy expressed at the outset of the French Revolution, was 'the son of a half-breed Indian squaw' who would put opponents under the guillotine.