Quotes About Rhetoric

I think a lot of Marx was quite sloppy. There was all sorts of politically aggressive language when he lacked arguments for things.

In America right now, we use words like 'smart' to talk about bombs. American rhetoric is grounded in ideas of capital-G Good, capital-E Evil, and it's very clear who is on which side. But in a book you can do just the opposite. You can use all lower-case words.

I'm not saying Michael Moore's smarter than Sean Hannity, but Michael Moore is better at running interviews than Hannity, even though Hannity's running the interview!

There's something just so kind of smooth about politicians.

No matter if Judeo-Christian rhetoric claims peace and understanding, they do so with one foot upon a grave- mound of separate traditions who don't acknowledge and submit to the restriction and ignorance of monotheism.

He who establishes his argument by noise and command, shows that his reason is weak.

To hear men talk of metonomies, metaphors, and allegories, and other grammar words, would not one think they signified some rare and exotic form of speaking? And yet they are phrases that come near to the babble of my chambermaid. And

Rhetoric flourished in Rome when their affairs were in their worst state and when they were shattered by the storms of civil war, just as a field left untamed bears the most flourishing weeds.

My speeches in no way resemble verbal muck, as you have been pleased to put it in the presence of a lady, but rather a sequence of tightly packed syllogisms, the merit of which would be appreciated by such connoisseurs as Sextus Empiricus, Martianus Capella,4 and, for all I know, Aristotle himself.

A profusion of fancies and quotations is out of place in a love-letter. True feeling is always direct, and never deviates into by-ways to cull flowers of rhetoric.

By joining the anti-abortion movement, the once guilty are propelled from deep moral unease to a secure position of moral innocence and superiority, with the added social bonding that comes from uniting against a shared enemy whom they depict as murderous and vile. That's quite a set of perks for a very low price of membership (namely, agreeing to vote Republican in the United States—or its counterparts elsewhere).

Aristotelian

persuasively, that

Quamquam scripsit artem rhetorieam Cleanthes, Chrysippus etiam, sed sic, ut si quis obmutescere concupierit, nihil aliud legere debeat.

Donald Trump. I

Literary works are pieces of rhetoric as well as reports. They demand a peculiarly vigilant kind of reading, one which is alert to tone, mood, pace, genre, syntax, grammar, texture, rhythm, narrative structure, punctuation, ambiguity – in fact to everything that comes under the heading of 'form'.

Life is not so predictable. I am forced to listen more carefully. In the right and left worlds, the stories told are largely set, there much to defend at the expense of the other, rhetoric is charged with certitude; it's safer here, we are sure we are correct. We become missionaries for a position, yes, exactly, no doubt about it, practitioners of the missionary position. Variety is lost. Diversity is lost. Creativity is lost in our inability to make love with the world.

True eloquence has an edge, sharp and clean.

Today, everyone thinks we need to stay positive and hopeful and not be completely honest about what we are seeing, what we know to be true. Whether we're talking about climate change or what's occurring on the streets in Ferguson, we are so afraid of offending people...and then, we only talk to our own constituencies and its' the same rhetoric over and over again until the words become bloodless. (p. 325)

I just find Bobby Kennedy's short campaign for president so inspiring because his rhetoric identified what America can be like if we care about each other.

I would never say John Kerry would be a great president. I will say that George Bush has divided us; he has filled this country with hatred.

Adjectives are not arguments.

Rhetoric uses syllogisms and other suasions to bring about a change of heart and of mind.

We once enjoyed fairly high rhetoric in America, most notably in our politics, but few today will have images of the Roman Senate brought to mind when they read of the goings on in the United States Senate.