Quotes About Rhetoric

One of the great cliches of campaign journalism is the notion that American elections have long since ceased to be about issues and ideas.

Mr. Obama has an ingenious approach to job losses: He describes them as job gains.

Mitt Romney says he believes in America and that he will restore American exceptionalism. I have news for him, we already have an exceptional American as president and we believe in Barack Obama.

At the end of the day, the only things that are shovel ready around here are the words coming out of Barack Obama and Joe Biden's mouth.

If the Obama administration is this afraid of Glenn Beck, how do they deal with the Iranians?

And that's why people no longer care which words they use as long as they use lots of them.

a silent concave of puppet buffoons neither eagles nor jaguars buzzard lawyers locuses wings of ink sawing mindibles ventriloquist coyotes peddlers of shadows beneficent satraps the cacomistle thief of hens the monument to the Rattle and its snake the altar to the mauser and the machete the mausoleum of the epauletted cayman rhetoric sculpted in phrases of cement

There was something pretentious about politics when it was taken to extremes.

Histories make men wise; poets witty; the mathematics subtle; natural philosophy deep; morals grave; logic and rhetoric able to contend.

If words can be lethal weapons, I must provide them with an arsenal.

Even if that's just bullshit, sir, it's first-rate bullshit.

Arguments are to be avoided, they are always vulgar and often convincing.

he can make every word he speaks draw blood

Like the boy who cried wolf, or the football coach whose pep talks wear thin, the pope or president who turns every cause into a holy one, every enemy into a Hitler, every conflict into a genocide, may soon find his audience rolling its eyes and sinking into the very cynicism he hopes to surmount.

Socrates' method of building an argument through gentle queries, he "dropped my abrupt contradiction" style of argument and "put on the humbler enquirer" of the Socratic method. By asking what seemed to be innocent questions, Franklin would draw people into making concessions that would gradually prove whatever point he was trying to assert.

There can be something he knows absolutely nothing about, and because of his crazy style and utter conviction, he can convince people that he knows what he's talking about

It is ill arguing against anything from its misuse.

The Scotch, it is well known, are more remarkable for the exercise of their intellectual powers, than for the keenness of their feelings ; they are, therefore, more moved by logic than by rhetoric, and more attracted by acute and argumentative reasoning on doctrinal points, than influenced by the enthusiastic appeals to the heart and to the passions, by which popular preachers in other countries win the favour of their hearers.

Upon subjects which interested him, and when quite at ease, he possessed that flow of natural, and somewhat florid eloquence, which has been supposed as powerful as figure, fashion, fame, or fortune, in winning the female heart. There

You're not an artist, you're not a scientist, you're not an intellectual. All that's left to you is politics.

During the last presidential campaign, candidate Barack Obama, asked why he was not wearing a flag pin, answered that it represented "a substitute" for "true patriotism." Bad move. Months later, Obama quietly beat a retreat and began wearing the flag on his lapel. He does so still.

While Obama merely bowed clumsily in the direction of Idiot America, John McCain set up housekeeping there.

Renaissance Humanism, which under Petrarch's formation and tutelage vindicated the importance of poetry and rhetoric as effectors of an intimate bond between reason and emotion, thought and action, intellect and will. Petrarchan Humanism became the historical force mobilizing thought and letters against the blind impulsiveness of an illusory popular culture and the elitism of the philosophical schools" (Trinkaus, 135).

By the Middle Ages… the introduction of the Trivium was well-known: SÂDI, an educated black from Tombouctou, author of the well-known work entitled, 'Tarikh es-Soudan' cites amongst the subjects that he mastered, logic, dialection, grammar, rhetoric, not to mention law and other disciplines...the long lists of subjects studied and the lettered African intellectuals who taught them at the University of Tombouctou…