And Rhetoric Quotes

#1. Throughout history, even the harshest and most shameful measures are regularly accompanied by professions of noble intent - and rhetoric about bestowing freedom and independence.

Noam Chomsky

#2. There's life for you. Spend the best years of your life studying penmanship and rhetoric and syntax and Beowulf and George Eliot, and then somebody steals your pencil.

Dorothy Parker

#3. I have known writers who paid no damned attention whatever to the rules of grammar and rhetoric and somehow made the language behave for them.

Red Smith

#4. We must bring the rule of law to its full fruition in the United States, and when we do, we will have achieved the goals and rhetoric of our Founding Fathers.

David Boies

#5. I come from a world where accountability and accomplishments matter, and where titles and rhetoric take a back seat to results.

Carly Fiorina

#6. The difference between poetry and rhetoric
is being ready to kill
yourself
instead of your children.

Audre Lorde

#7. If something's public then it seems like the important thing is the person in that public. And the notion of rhetoric. I went to Jesuit schools that focused on first there's grammar, then there's rhetoric, and rhetoric's usually seen as a kind of degraded method, because you're trying to persuade.

Vito Acconci

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

Francis Bacon

#9. It's very easy to have slogans and rhetoric that people will follow, but eventually the slogans fall away.

Saad Hariri

#10. Ahmadinijad was stupid enbough to be a wolf in wolf's clothing, to expose his teeth and nails and alert the west. I can be a wolf in sheep's clothing. I have all the diplomatic and rhetoric skills to do so.

Hassan Rouhani

#11. Get into the habit of imagining an alternate scenario. By posing such 'imagine if' questions ... we can distance ourselves from the frames, cues, anchors and rhetoric that might be affecting us.

Noreena Hertz

#12. It's time to let science and medicine, not politics and rhetoric, lead us to good, sound policy.

Eliot Spitzer

#13. The silence of the three of them had made a little kernel of sense in a world of boasting, self-excuse and rhetoric.

Thornton Wilder

#14. Today the invisible hand seems confused and indecisive ... Ideology and rhetoric increasingly guide policy decision, often bearing little relationship to factual reality. And the America we once knew seems divided and angry, defiantly embracing unreason.

Shawn Lawrence Otto

#15. What avail all your scholarly accomplishments and learning, compared with wisdom and manhood? To omit his other behavior, see whata work this comparatively unread and unlettered man wrote within six weeks. Where is our professor of belles-lettres, or of logic and rhetoric, who can write so well?

Henry David Thoreau

#16. He delighted in writing, in the joinery and embellishment of his sentences, in the consciousness of high rare virtue when every word had been used in its purest and most precise sense, in the kitten games of syntax and rhetoric. Words could do anything except generate their own meaning.

Evelyn Waugh

#17. When confidence is deemed arrogance..
Happiness and joy deemed showing off self..
Strong words deemed mere big talk and rhetoric..
Small minds..only time will prove and show the truth..

Abha Maryada Banerjee

#18. I answer, Socrates, that rhetoric is the art of persuasion in courts of law and other assemblies, as I was just now saying, and about the just and unjust.

Gorgias

#19. Political rhetoric alone does not build a nation unless it is backed by the power of sacrifice, toil and virtue.

A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

#20. My purpose in public address and in speech is really encapsulated in three C's: clear, concise, correct. No overblowing rhetoric or anything like that. As simple as possible: clear, concise, correct.

Bob Sheppard

#21. Rhetoric is nothing but reason well dressed and argument put in order.

Jeremy Collier

#22. Like mythology, Greek philosophy has a tendency to personify ideas. And the Sophist is not merely a teacher of rhetoric for a fee of one or fifty drachmae (Crat.), but an ideal of Plato's in which the falsehood of all mankind is reflected.

Plato

#23. Roosevelt's declaration that Americans had 'nothing to fear but fear itself' was a glorious piece of inspirational rhetoric and just as gloriously wrong.

Russell Baker

#24. How long do politicians have to keep on promising heaven and delivering hell before people catch on and stop getting swept away by rhetoric?

Thomas Sowell

#25. Communication does not depend on syntax, or eloquence, or rhetoric, or articulation but on the emotional context in which the message is being heard. People can only hear you when they are moving toward you, and they are not likely to when your words are pursuing them.

Edwin H. Friedman

#26. Lewis had developed a trademark style, slow enough for note taking, loud enough to rouse the dullest listener, straightforward, abundantly furnished with quotations, and lavish in wit.

Philip Zaleski

#27. People are tired of the status quo. You see that in various movements in and out of our [the Republicans]party, but most candidates are offering hollow rhetoric, not specific solutions.

Carly Fiorina

#28. Theater is perhaps one of the few places left where we are in a dialogue right now. Everything has become so partisan, and the rhetoric has become so heated, that conversation is almost impossible.

Paula Vogel

#29. Steady and righteous we may be, my friend, but without courage to risk ourselves for our brother, we are but politicians - blustering whores to rhetoric.

Christopher Moore

#30. The quality of rhetoric emanating from the psychedelic community must improve radically. If it does not, we will forfeit the reclamation of our birthright and all opportunity for exploring the psychedelic dimension will be closed off.

Terence McKenna

#31. Since Shakespeare had a feel for revolutionary rhetoric, let's all cry: "Peace, freedom and liberty!

Carl William Brown

#32. And it's significant that he has been using the, you know, language of betrayal in his rhetoric about Turkey. He called the shoot down a treacherous stab in the back by an accomplice of the terrorists. And that suggests that there could still be some harsh revenge in store for Turkey.

Corey Flintoff

#33. Thus rhetoric, it seems, is a producer of persuasion for belief, not for instruction in the matter of right and wrong ... And so the rhetorician's business is not to instruct a law court or a public meeting in matters of right and wrong, but only to make them believe.

Plato

#34. We owe our troops more than rhetoric; we owe them a real plan. The Administration has yet to put forward a strategy for achieving stability in Iraq, ending the conflict, and handing over sovereignty to the people of Iraq and the new Iraqi government.

Dennis Cardoza

#35. The period is one of the most complicated and concepts of classical rhetoric. Nobody in the ancient world could quite decide what it meant, but they were united in the belief that it was terribly, terribly important.

Mark Forsyth

#36. There is no regard for human lives, or local national interests. It is because the West, despite its hypocritical rhetoric (political correctness) does not really consider non-whites and non-Christians as human beings.

Andre Vltchek

#37. No one is born with good character; it's not a hereditary trait. And it isn't determined by a single noble act. Character is established by conscientious adherence to moral values, not by lofty rhetoric or good intentions.

Michael Josephson

#38. Men have sacrificed and crippled themselves physically and emotionally to feed, house, and protect women and children. None of their pain or achievement is registered in feminist rhetoric, which portrays men as oppressive and callous exploiters.

Camille Paglia

#39. Liberals were just as engaged and using the rhetoric of a sort of a battle with the Soviets and with Communism in general, with an evil empire.

Jeff Sharlet

#40. While sticks and stones break bones, words can never hurt? Manifestly untrue. Politics everywhere are holistic, interconnected, and the rhetoric of right or left can produce toxic atmospheres in which lunacy thrives.

Phillip Adams

#41. I think he could have made most of the trips and gone to most of the fund-raisers if he would have avoided the partisan rhetoric and talked to the country as President in each of these appearances rather than to the narrow partisan audiences.

Robert Teeter

#42. Given his campaign rhetoric about Afghanistan, I think I myself, our commanders, and our troops had expected more commitment to the cause and more passion for it from him. ...I never doubted Obama's support for the troops, only his support for their mission." Pg. 299

Robert M. Gates

#43. On the other side, I do believe that the rhetoric we are seeing from the Democrats today is unprecedented, is a new low in presidential politics and goes beyond political discourse and amounts to political hate speech.

Ed Gillespie

#44. So much of western self-perception and intellectual worldview has been shaped by the moral rhetoric of the Cold War, the discourse in which communism featured as a clear enemy, determined to rule the world.

Pankaj Mishra

#45. J.R.R. Tolkien, said a student, "could turn a lecture room into a mead hall in which he was the bard and we were the feasting, listening guests.

Philip Zaleski

#46. I've said before: If Osama bin Laden was a Christian, Iraq was the Christmas present he always wanted but never expected his parents to give. It validated for the Muslim world virtually all of bin Laden's rhetoric. He had always said the Americans will destroy any strong Muslim regime, and we did.

Michael Scheuer

#47. Mitt Romney's primary season embrace of the social and economic agenda of the more rabid elements of his party doomed him, especially the shrill immigration rhetoric and the harshly insensitive theory that no additional sacrifice or contribution should be sought from those at the top.

Eliot Spitzer

#48. Words are catch-basins of experience, fingerprints and footprints of the past that the literary detective may scrutinize in order to sleuth out the history of human consciousness.

Philip Zaleski

#49. Nevertheless, Rhetoric is useful, because the true and the just are naturally superior to their opposites, so that, if decisions are improperly made, they must owe their defeat to their own advocates; which is reprehensible.

Aristotle.

#50. When we have broken our god of tradition, and ceased from our god of rhetoric, then may God fire the heart with His presence.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#51. trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic)

Anonymous

#52. The arts of speech are rhetoric and poetry. Rhetoric is the art of transacting a serious business of the understanding as if it were a free play of the imagination; poetry that of conducting a free play of the imagination as if it were a serious business of the understanding.

Immanuel Kant

#53. De Quincey compared the two arts of rhetoric, logos and pathos, to rudder and sail. The first guides discourse and the second powers it (Thonssen and Baird, 1948, p. 358). Even

Haddon Robinson

#54. Progressive rhetoric has the effect of concealing social crisis and moral breakdown by presenting them as the birth pangs of a new order.

Christopher Lasch

#55. Democrats were simply hoping to win some political points by getting their outlandish rhetoric published in the newspapers and heard on the talk shows.

John Doolittle

#56. The political environment we create matters because a disturbed person cannot always tell the difference between explosive rhetoric and explosive actions.

Madeleine M. Kunin

#57. Now if you have proofs to bring forward, bring them forward, and your moral discourse as well; if you have no enthymemes, then fall back upon moral discourse: after all, it is more fitting for a good man to display himself as an honest fellow than as a subtle reasoner.

Aristotle.

#58. A good ruler has to learn his world's language, and that's different for every world, the language you don't hear just with your ears.

Frank Herbert

#59. He (Larry Summers) can frame arguments with such force and conviction that people think he knows more than he does.

Ron Suskind

#60. However tiresome to others, the most indefatigable orator is never tedious to himself. The sound of his own voice never loses its harmony to his own ear; and among the delusions, which self-love is ever assiduous in attempting to pass upon virtue, he fancies himself to be sounding the sweetest tones

John Quincy Adams

#61. As the U.S., much of Europe, and the U.K. shift toward the political right, the rhetoric grows more insular, defensive, and protective.

Samantha Harvey

#62. The law needs to be applied to everyone equally and the Home Office has previous in banning hate preachers engaging in rhetoric similar to that of [Donald] Trump.

Tulip Siddiq

#63. We do not need more division. We certainly do not need something as complex and emotional as Vietnam reduced to simple campaign rhetoric.

John F. Kerry

#64. One of the principles that we operate on in this country is that leaders are held accountable. The simple truth is that we went into Iraq on the basis of some intuition, some fear, and some exaggerated rhetoric and some very, very scanty evidence.

Wesley Clark

#65. But it is the subjects, the conversations, the facts we shy away from, which claim us in the form of writer's block, as mere rhetoric, as hysteria, insomnia, and constriction of the throat.

Adrienne Rich

#66. We have a lot of rhetoric today about "high rigor" and you often hear terms like that thrown about when discussing the Common Core. But the American education system historically has not embraced intellectual seriousness.

Dana Goldstein

#67. Pick up a fifth-grade math or rhetoric textbook from 1850 and you'll see that the texts were pitched then on what would today be considered college level. The continuing cry for "basic skills" practice is a smoke screen

John Taylor Gatto

#68. At times, said the founder of the Chicago Tribune, Lincoln seemed to reach into the clouds and take out the thunderbolts.

Harold Holzer

#69. Reader, if thou intendest to go any farther, I would entreat thee to stay here a little. If thou art, as many in this pretending age, a sign or title gazer, and comest into books as Cato into the theatre, to go out again, - thou hast had thy entertainment; farewell!

John Owen

#70. I was always kind of florid. And full of rhetoric. That was my flaw. My whole time writing, I've had to work against that because it can be a wrecking posture.

Barry Hannah

#71. Sure, Malcolm Turnbull is less anti-science and anti-culture than [Tony] Abbott, but low bar, and there's not a lot to show for it beyond rhetoric.

Justine Larbalestier

#72. It is thus evident that Rhetoric does not deal with any one definite class of subjects, but, like Dialectic, [is of general application]; also, that it is useful; and further, that its function is not so much to persuade, as to find out in each case the existing means of persuasion.

Aristotle.

#73. 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.

Herman Cain

#74. Unquestionably, American political rhetoric can be repugnant, and the Right can certainly be as guilty as the Left.

John Podhoretz

#75. The Western rhetoric of appeasement creates a self-reinforcing loop of mental and moral corruption. Speaking the truth now would mean confessing to many months of lies

Garry Kasparov

#76. One of the many dreadful aspects of the Kennedy 'legacy' is the now-unbreakable grip of celebrity politics, image-doctoring, stage management, and "torch-passing" rhetoric in general.

Christopher Hitchens

#77. House Speaker Thomas Reed could destroy an argument or expose a fallacy in fewer words than anyone else. His language was vivid and picturesque. He had a way of phrasing things which was peculiarly apt and peculiarly his own.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#78. People are angry that things as common sense as securing the border and eliminating sanctuary cities are being framed as extreme views. They are tired of empty rhetoric without action, and they are hungry for a leader from outside the professional political class.

Carly Fiorina

#79. He steps on stage and draws the sword of rhetoric, and when he is through, someone is lying wounded and thousands of others are either angry or consoled.

Pete Hamill

#80. 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.

Christian Nestell Bovee

#81. Lyndon Johnson knew how to make the most of such enthusiasm and how to play on it and intensify it. He wanted his audience to become involved. He wanted their hands up in the air. And having been a schoolteacher he knew how to get their hands up. He began, in his speeches, to ask questions.

Robert A. Caro

#82. Today, it is imperative to end this hysteria, to refute the rhetoric of the Cold War and to accept the obvious fact: Russia is an independent, active participant in international affairs. Like other countries, it has its own national interests that need to be taken into account and respected.

Vladimir Putin

#83. The rhetoric of theory is always in a bind. It pronounces ideas and denounces failures to accept or grasp them while insisting that there are no grounds either for accepting or grasping ideas.

Paul Fry

#84. Fiction is a particular kind of rhetoric, a way of thinking that I think can be useful in your life. It asks you to image the world through someone else's eyes, and it allows you to try to empathize with situations that you haven't actually experienced.

Dan Chaon

#85. Rhetoric takes no real account of the art in literature and morality takes no account of the art in life.

Joseph Wood Krutch

#86. I believe strongly that we need to get beyond rhetoric, beyond industry and environmentalists fighting with each other, and seriously solve problems.

Gale Norton

#87. [Senators John Kerry & John Edwards] have risen high in Democratic polls with a brand of class resentment and soak-the-rich rhetoric rooted in the old-fashioned liberalism of Ted Kennedy.

William Safire

#88. I don't know how it happened. Nobody does. There are only theories, empty rhetoric and doomsday prophecies. None of them are right, but none of them are completely wrong, either. They all have a grain of truth. All I know is where I was and what I was doing when it happened.

Summer Lane

#89. A third characteristic is the deliberate multi-styled and heterovoiced nature of all these genres. They reject the stylistic unity (or better, the single-styled nature) of the epic, the tragedy, high rhetoric, the lyric.

Mikhail Bakhtin

#90. Most people here agree that the rhetoric got overblown on both sides of the Atlantic before the Iraq war, and it was a disagreement among friends over the timing, not the substance, of the Iraq war.

John S. Tanner

#91. ...The coarse rhetoric and reduction of women to violently empty reproductive organs isn't a great way to argue against Trump's vulgarity. The unhinged rhetoric, violent anti-speech street protests,and hysteria currently on display don't make Trump look like he's a unique threat.

Mollie Hemingway

#92. They were interchangeable tools, and the catchy phrases continued without abatement.

Robert A. Caro

#93. 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.

Theodore Roosevelt

#94. It is said that the price of freedom is vigilance, and an important form of vigilance is attention to political rhetoric, which often reveals how things are going.

Kenneth Minogue

#95. Ethnicity and tribe began, by definition, where sovereignty and taxes ended. The ethnic zone was feared and stigmatized by state rhetoric precisely because it was beyond its grasp and therefore an example of defiance and an ever-present temptation to those who might wish to evade the state.

James C. Scott

#96. Where 'Paranormal Activity' really comes into its own is its rhetoric of legitimacy - how it uses itself to authenticate itself, and thus furthers the pretence of being real.

Stephen Graham Jones

#97. Unfortunately, President Obama's failed policies of new regulations, higher taxes, and Obamacare and his anti-business rhetoric have hit Hispanics especially hard. Big government really hurts those who are trying to make it.

Marco Rubio

#98. Liberals need to take the advice they routinely give to conservatives: that there are consequences to their divisive rhetoric, and that in their attempts to score political points, they are also inciting violence.

Gary Bauer

#99. President Obama is a gifted politician. He is gifted with rhetoric virtuosity. He is gifted with the ability to lie directly to camera without blinking. And he is gifted with some of the most incompetent conservative opposition in the history of the country.

Ben Shapiro

#100. Rhetoric and dialectics can't change what I have learned from observation and experience.

J. Paul Getty