Quotes About Rhetoric

One of the most familiar tricks of the orator or propagandist is to leave certain things unsaid, things that are highly relevant to the argument, but that might be challenged if they were made explicit. While

Politics hates a vacuum. If it isn't filled with hope, someone will fill it with fear

La elocuencia de una exposición es directamente proporcional a la inteligencia de quien la formula, del mismo modo que su credibilidad lo es a la estupidez de quien la recibe

La elocuencia de una exposición es directamente proporcional a la inteligencia de quien la formula, del mismo modo que su credibilidad lo es a la estupidez de quien la recibe»

Nobody has a magic lamp which can tell you in advance whether what you say will be effective in persuading an audience.

The words are frightening - how you're going to build a wall, how you're going to have Mexico pay for it. What does this mean?

Oh! just, subtle, and mighty opium! that to the hearts of poor and rich alike, for the wounds that will never heal, and for 'the pangs that tempt the spirit to rebel,' bringest an assuaging balm; eloquent opium! that with thy potent rhetoric stealest away the purposes of wrath; and to the guilty man, for one night givest back the hopes of his youth, and hands washed pure of blood....

Don't think you can persuade me with appeals to my intellectual vanity.

In a republican nation, whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance

Explosion without an objective', declared Miles Blundell, 'is politics in its purest form'.

What is called "planning" in political rhetoric is the government's suppression of other people's plans by superimposing on them a collective plan, created by third parties, armed with the power of government and exempted from paying the costs that these collective plans impose on others.

But that such an administration could be elected in the first place, headed by a man whose only qualifications to be President of the United States at a dangerous time in the history of the world were rhetoric, style and symbolism—and whose animus against the values and institutions of America had been demonstrated repeatedly over a period of decades beforehand—speaks volumes about the inadequacies of our educational system and the degeneration of our culture.

The time is long overdue to count the costs of runaway rhetoric and heedless accusations - especially since most of the costs, including the high social cost of a breakdown of law and order, are paid by vulnerable people for whose benefit such rhetoric and such accusations are ostensibly being made.

Choice, like behavior and performance, is often circumvented by the vocabulary of the anointed.

lifelong benefits [to students who learn to think for themselves] include a healthy skepticism towards political slogans and a healthy desire to check out the facts before repeating rhetoric on other issues.

Unsafe at Any Speed is a classic of propaganda in its ability to use distracting or dismissive rhetoric to evade a need to confront opposing arguments with evidence or logic.

Drawing up policy blueprints is a task for which there has never been a shortage of eager candidates. We can only hope that those policies will be based on hard facts about the real world, rather than on rhetoric or preconceptions.

Words, as you well know, can be powerful. - Digger

For rhetoric as such is not rooted in any past condition of human society. It is rooted in an essential function of language itself, a function that is wholly realistic, and is continually born anew; the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols.

Speech in its essence is not neutral.

Wherever there is persuasion, there is rhetoric, and wherever there is rhetoric, there is meaning.

In politics all abstract terms conceal treachery.

Abraham Lincoln had not given a single speech on his own behalf during either of his campaigns, and Rutherford B. Hayes advised Garfield to do the same. "Sit crosslegged," he said, "and look wise.

Der ganze Styl seiner Darbiethung erinnerte zwingend an die emotionalen, von einer gänzlich falschen Gnadenlehre inspirierten Predigten gewisser Sectirer, denen noch nicht einmal das Civürecht einen Platz in unserem Gemeinwesen einräumt.