Quotes About Rhetoric

My message of common-sense solutions is resonating with people. People around the country are starting to know who I am and starting to identify me with solutions, not rhetoric.

It's not normal that, when you close your eyes and listen to the news, too often the political back-and-forth in America sounds too much like it does in the kinds of countries that the State Department warns Americans not to travel to.

'Neechi rajniti' does not mean politics of backward communities. Modi has distorted the statement to link with caste to play backward card for political gains.

A statement is persuasive and credible either because it is directly self-evident or because it appears to be proved from other statements that are so.

The rise of populism has steadily coalesced movements of millions of people around its divisive us-against-them rhetoric, motivating so many more people to become active political campaigners and party members to champion the case for liberal democracy.

Populism tends to look good from a distance, but close up it can be frightening.

It is always a disappointment to turn from forthright consideration of some subject - whether from the Left or the Right, a poet or a plumber - to the Beltway version, in which the only aspects of the issue that matter are the effects it will have on the fortunes of the two parties and the various men in power.

Who shall speak for the people? Who knows the works from A to Z so he can say, "I know what the people want"? Who is this phenom? where did he come from? When have the people been half as rotten as what the panderers to the people dangle before crowds? —from "The People, Yes" by Carl Sandburg

conservatism's populist myth.

The value of a philosopher's thought is not in its answers—no philosopher has any that are more helpful than saying nothing at all—but in how well they speak to the prejudgments of their consumers. Such is the importance—and the nullity—of rhetoric. Ask any hard-line pessimist, but do not expect him to expect you to take his words seriously.

Nazism and communism were the same thing; every man on the street knew it. The difference between them was a semantical matter for the fancier poli-sci professors at Fordham.

Had I a ropemaker to my father, and someone had cast it in my teeth, I would forthwith have written in praise of ropemakers, and proved it by sound sillogistry to be one of the seven liberal sciences.

When the tongue or the pen is let loose in a frenzy of passion, it is the man, and not the subject, that becomes exhausted.

To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.

two-bit hack politician who ran for

Rhetoric accomplishes its work by inducing us to shift, at least potentially, how we dwell or see ourselves dwelling in the world.

Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.

Life in general has never been even close to fair, so the pretense that the government can make it fair is a valuable and inexhaustible asset to politicians who want to expand government.

Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.

Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.

Rhetoric is no substitute for reality.

All politics is marketing. And in marketing, there are but two variables: product and salesmanship.

A person like Donald Trump, who has said what he's said about Muslims, Mexicans, women, George Bush, John McCain - a person like that should not be the nominee of our party or be the president, and I will campaign for an alternative to Donald Trump until that avenue is no longer open.

I'm not interested in political theater.