Quotes About Rhetoric

I hate negative ads in general.

I don't think you negotiate with people by going around telling them that they're like Nazi guards or it's all about prosecco.

Even amid the heated political rhetoric that dominates the news media and social media, resurrected false claims about the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., stand out as egregious.

The language has changed. When I grew up and watched the campaigns of John Kennedy, even with Richard Nixon, there was a lot higher level of civility. Now we describe a disagreement as an attack.

As I travel across Illinois and talk with people, and as others reach out to my office desperate for help, I am becoming convinced that, despite their rhetoric, many lenders have no interest in actually helping their customers.

He had developed a trick in college for speaking with authority. He believed that breaking his argument into numbers forced people to pay attention. How you said something could be more important than what you said.

He was a consummate politician-- which is to say he was given to expedient speech and lacked even a vestigial spine.

Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river.

It is not uncommon for a leader to win a debate - or even an election - who is intellectually inferior to his opponent but is better able to incite the emotions of the masses.

I personally never expected anything of Obama, and wrote about it before the 2008 primaries. I thought it was smoke and mirrors [...] I don't usually admire Sarah Palin, but when she was making fun of this 'hopey changey' stuff, she was right, there was nothing there. And it was understood by the people who run the political system, and so it's no great secret that the US electoral system is mainly a public relations extravaganza...it's sort of a marketing affair.

I think that's a terrific technique of propaganda. To impose concision is a way of virtually guaranteeing that the party line gets repeated over and over again, and that nothing else is heard.

the terms of political discourse are designed so as to prevent thought.

NATO bombing of Serbia was undertaken by the 'international community,' according to consistent Western rhetoric—although those who did not have their heads buried in the sand knew that it was opposed by most of the world, often quite vocally. Those who do not support the actions of wealth and power are not part of 'the global community.

The ritual denunciation of the so-called 'socialist' states is replete with distortions and often outright lies.

alleged commitment to democracy and human rights is mere rhetoric, directly contrary to actual policy.

At their most eloquent, proponents of neoliberalism sound as if they are doing poor people, the environment, and everybody else a tremendous service as they enact policies on behalf of the wealthy few. The

truisms at least have the merit of being true, which distinguishes them from a good deal of political discourse. And

Politics. It's for idiots and bad actors.

I would rather be wrong, by God, with Plato than be correct with those men.

There is nothing so absurd that it has not been said by some philosopher.

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Your kind of politics is dead. They are dead because any tinhorn with a loud mouth and a brassy front could gain power by appeal to mob psychology.

A propagandist doesn't have to know what he is talking about, just so he talks convincingly

Especially politics; that was the best trough to wallow in. You could get your snout, eyes, head and front hooves in that mess of muck and have a fine old time splashing around. It was an inexhaustible subject to devour, a swill with a little of everything in it, because everything, according to Judd, was political.