Quotes About Rhetoric

Be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary.

The systematic use of nicknames such as "Lyin' Ted" and "Crooked Hillary" displaced certain character traits that might more appropriately have been affixed to the president himself.

The second mode is shamanistic incantation. As Klemperer noted, the fascist style depends upon "endless repetition," designed to make the fictional plausible and the criminal desirable.

Confidence in duration is the antidote to panic and the tonic of demagogy.

Lots of people act well, but very few people talk well, which shows that talking is much the more difficult thing of the two, and much the finer thing also.

An alliterative prefix served as an ornament of oratory.

Pfui', I said. It is an expression I don't often use...

Companies understand that if their employees are sick, it's really expensive. So despite the rhetoric I hear, thank God employers are still in the health-care system.

We spend so much time bantering about the words when the real open conversations might very well be our actions. I worry about our rhetoric.

After ages of bombast, the rhetoric of virtue has become ironic and shy.

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

Hence the uselessness of logic: no one ever convinced anybody by logic; and even logicians use logic only as a source of income. To convince a man, you must appeal to his self-interest, his desires, his will.

Is it not shameful that men should be ruled by orators, who "go ringing on in long harangues, like brazen pots which, when struck, continue to sound till a hand is put upon them"?

Nothing was more tiresome than a candidate who started to believe his own spin.

A man or a race either if he's any good can survive his past without even needing to escape from it and not because of the high quite often only too rhetorical rhetoric of humanity but for the simple indubitable practical reason of his future: that capacity to survive and absorb and endure and still be steadfast.

the rhetorical formulas of objurgation with which I was to begin a page of inquiries of you: whether you were dead

Good propaganda, to be effective, as Hitler and Goebbels had learned from experience, needs more than words. It needs deeds, however much they may have to be fabricated.

It was at this time that he published an open letter to a Communist leader assuring him that Nazism and Communism were really the same thing.

Among those elected that fall of 1946 was a little-known local judge, Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin, to the Senate, and an even lesser known local politician in California, Richard M. Nixon, to the House. Both had accused their opponents of sympathy with Communism and of having "Communist" support. The voters had fallen for it, as they usually do in this country.

Everyone wants to demagogue everyone else. That may be good politics, but it's awful policy.

A profusion of fancies and quotations is out of place in a love-letter. True feeling is always direct, and never deviates into by-ways to cull flowers of rhetoric.

Or take the belief common among some evangelicals that every individual needs an identifiable point of personal faith conversion to create a "personal relationship with Jesus." That's certainly a key to evangelical revivalism, and one can definitely find various Bible verses that seem to buttress such a claim. But, altogether, the direct biblical evidence for that theology and rhetoric is in fact pretty thin.

It is still possible, in an election, to use the word emigrant in such a way that it damages one's opponent

the military coup detonated all manner of private hatreds, as well as social fears and prejudice – all of which were legitimized by the coup's pervasive rhetoric of "purification", to become an integral part of the "crusade", with lethal results.