Quotes About Rhetoric

To hear some men talk of the government, you would suppose that Congress was the law of gravitation, and kept the planets in their places.

The trouble with straw men is it only takes a single match to set them ablaze.

In Washington, a man gets up to speak and doesn't say a thing, and the other men disagree with him for three hours.

Cicero said loud-bawling orators were driven by their weakness to noise, as lame men to take horse.

Every man is eloquent once in his life.

Talking and eloquence are not the same: to speak and to speak well are two things. A fool may talk, but a wise man speaks.

Any man who makes a speech more than six times a year is bound to repeat himself, not because he has little to say, but because he wants applause and the old stuff gets it.

When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept: Ambition should be made of sterner stuff: Yet Brutus says he was ambitious; And Brutus is an honourable man.

Democracy is a word all public men use and none understand.

An auctioneer is a man who proclaims with a hammer that he has picked a pocket with his tongue.

With words we govern men.

No man was ever eloquent by trying to be eloquent, but only by being so.

that since both the British policeman and the Nazi storm trooper wore a uniform, the British policeman was a brute. It is one of the chief characteristics of modern rhetoric, designed not so much to find the truth as (in the words of former Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam) to 'maintain your rage.

One of our defects as a nation is a tendency to use what have been called "weasel words." When a weasel sucks eggs the meat is sucked out of the egg. If you use a "weasel word" after another there is nothing left of the other.

A typical vice of American politics is the avoidance of saying anything real on real issues.

Rhetoric is a poor substitute for action, and we have trusted only to rhetoric. If we are really to be a great nation, we must not merely talk we must act big.

The object of oratory alone in not truth, but persuasion.

No sophism is too gross to delude minds distempered by party spirit.

Great orators who are not also great writers become very indistinct historical shadows to the generation immediately following them. The spell vanishes with the voice.

You may make as many fair speeches as you choose, but you lie.

Can there be a more horrible object in existence than an eloquent man not speaking the truth?

If an eloquent speaker speak not the truth, is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?

Negative politics have always been around.

I think sometimes negative campaigning, like so much, is in the eye of the beholder, and I don't think we'll ever get rid of it.