Quotes About Rhetoric

Well, teachers have been profoundly demoralized in recent years and are often treated with contempt by politicians. There's a great deal of reckless rhetoric in Washington about the mediocrity of the teaching profession - and I don't find that to be true at all.

No orator can top the one who can give good nicknames.

Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel. It is to bring another out of his bad sense into your good sense.

It is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other.

Jana Sangh ko vote do, bidi peena chhod do/ Bidi mein tambaku hai, Kangresswala daku hai'.

The world over, the rhetoric of modern democratic politics has been marked by two rather opposed rhetorical styles. The first appeals to hope, to popular aspirations for economic prosperity and social peace. The second appeals to fear, to sectional worries about being worsted or swamped by one's historic enemies.

Language was just that thing that happened when you opened your mouth at the table, squeezed a few noises out of your vocal chords, and induced Socrates thereby to pass the salt.

those who offer invective rather than argument discourage others from speaking.

They bragged about democracy and demonized countries that didn't have it, but they didn't really believe in democracy. They believed in hypocrisy. Their moral compass had spun out of control, from the very top down.

framing' - the cunning technique of dumbing down complex, controversial issues and policies by using powerful, evocative, emotive catchphrases and images in order to prejudice and undermine any potential challenge to those polices.

People do not like negative campaigns.

I could use a Chris Matthews-level speech writer to script everything I say. That would be good.

In 2008, I started the election season as a critic of Hillary Clinton, a fan of Barack Obama, and a supporter of John Edwards. But by the end of Clinton's historic drive toward nomination, the gendered rhetoric used against her - as well as the way so many men in my own party diminished the value of electing a female president - had radicalized me.

I don't know what Trump has to do to lose his supporters. It's like a religion. He's a school bully.

It is a paradox that every dictator has climbed to power on the ladder of free speech. Immediately on attaining power each dictator has suppressed all free speech except his own.

Political elites look increasingly interchangeable: Blair, Brown, and Cameron have all tried to provide cover for the surrender of sovereignty to foreign investors with invocations of 'British' values, and, more opportunistically, anti-immigrant rhetoric.

The secret of the demagogue is to appear as dumb as his audience so that these people can believe themselves as smart as he is.

Language is power. When you turn "torture" into "enhanced interrogation," or murdered children into "collateral damage," you break the power of language to convey meaning, to make us see, feel, and care. But it works both ways. You can use the power of words to bury meaning or to excavate it.

Huey Long once said, "Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.

it was impossible to convey the complexities of an economic reform programme when voters only understood war-cries or catchphrases. He was more effective at talking sense into people, and in improving their comprehension

To describe the forests of the world as its 'lungs' does no harm, and it might do some good if it encourages people to preserve them. But the rhetoric of holistic harmony can degenerate into a kind of dotty, Prince Charles-style mysticism.

As a concerned American colleague writes to me: 'Europeans need to know there is a traveling theo-freak show which actually advocates reinstatement of Old Testament law - killing of homosexuals etc. - and the right to hold office, or even to vote, for Christians only. Middle class crowds cheer tot his rhetoric. If secularists are not vigilant, Dominionists and Reconstructionists will soon be mainstream in a true American theocracy.

Just think what the ordeal must be like for less intellectually robust people, less equipped by education and rhetorical skill than they are, or than Julia Sweeney is, to argue their corner in the face of obdurate family members.

Every word of Chairman Mao's is universal absolute truth, and every word equals ten thousand words!