Top 100 Quotes About Rhetoric
#1. When critics surrender to the prevailing orthodoxy, the author says they adopt the rhetoric of an occupied country, one that expects no liberation from liberation.
Harold Bloom
#2. Like my colleagues, I did about 10 to 15 town hall meetings on this issue; and what I found is people came with a sincere interest to learn, a sincere interest to cut through the rhetoric and understand how this Medicare bill impacts them in their daily lives.
Chris Chocola
#3. What is called "planning" in political rhetoric is the government's suppression of other people's plans by superimposing on them a collective plan, created by third parties, armed with the power of government and exempted from paying the costs that these collective plans impose on others.
Thomas Sowell
#4. So I think it's important to communicate with the people in terms of what the real facts are on these proposals and try to have a discussion and a dialogue that gives people information. I think they're hungry for that rather than just political rhetoric.
John Podesta
#5. I spent my first two years at a small all-male college in Virginia called Hampden-Sydney. That was like going to college 120 years ago. The languages, a year of rhetoric, all of the great books, Western Man courses, stuff like that.
Stephen Colbert
#6. Recent presidents have gone off on ad hoc adventures. They have set unattainable goal because they have framed the issue incorrectly, as they believed their own rhetoric.
George Friedman
#7. Art has always been this
pure interrogation, rhetorical question less the rhetoric
whatever else it may have been obliged by social reality to appear.
Samuel Beckett
#8. We used awesome the way the British used brilliant: for anything at all. Perhaps ... it was a kind of antidepressant: inflated rhetoric to keep the sorry truth at bay.
Lorrie Moore
#9. Must, never, must avoid, must guard: the minatory commands came the eleven times (from the departing Eisenhower). In contrast, Kennedy's rhetoric on January 20 with a cascade of permissions: the word "let" rang out 14 times.
Rick Perlstein
#10. In my opinion, the unjust man whose tongue is full of glozing rhetoric, merits the heaviest punishment; vaunting that he can with his tongue gloze over injustice, he dares to act wickedly, yet he is not over-wise.
Euripides
#11. Rhetoric can be easily recognized for it is delightfully sweet sounding but it is utterly void of sacrifice, which means it is utterly void of substance. Christmas is irrefutable evidence that God never engages in rhetoric.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#12. It's very easy to have slogans and rhetoric that people will follow, but eventually the slogans fall away.
Saad Hariri
#13. It is up to the public to stop attending these theatrical, and aquatic shows, and circuses with wild animals. The rhetoric about how the animals are happy and well cared for are lies. Don't be swayed by them. The money behind these shows is huge; there is nothing good about them.
Tippi Hedren
#14. There are professional negotiators working for the writers and the actors, but basically you've got the writers and actors negotiating against businessmen. That's why you get rhetoric.
Dick Wolf
#15. One day, Mexico will have a leader who is nationalist not simply in rhetoric, but also in fact.
Stephen Kinzer
#16. A lot of times in the rhetoric, people forget the facts. And the facts are that thousands of small businesses-Hispanically owned or otherwise-pay taxes at the highest marginal rate.
George W. Bush
#17. Courses in prosody, rhetoric and comparative philology would be required of all students, and every student would have to select three courses out of courses in mathematics, natural history, geology, meteorology, archaeology, mythology, liturgics, cooking.
W. H. Auden
#18. A campaign ought to demonstrate the basic human decency of the candidate. That means your First Amendment rights end at the tip of your opponent's nose - even in the matter of political rhetoric.
Mike Pence
#19. Rhetoric was to be surveyed from the standpoint of philosophy.
Aristotle.
#20. We cannot all ARGUE, but we can all PRAY; We cannot all be LEADERS, but we can all be PLEADERS; We cannot all be mighty in RHETORIC, but we can all be prevalent in PRAYER.
Charles Spurgeon
#21. If rhetoric study was the military, grammar teachers would be the drill sergeants.
T.K. Naliaka
#22. When you strip away the rhetoric, preservation is simply having the good sense to hold on to things that are well designed, that link us with our past in a meaningful way, and that have plenty of good use left in them.
Richard Moe
#23. We've advanced in the construction of a true free-trade area across South America ... What's needed now is less rhetoric and more action.
Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva
#24. In the coming year, I believe we can make sure America lives up to its legacy as a land of opportunity if the President is willing to back up his rhetoric with substance.
Ron Kind
#25. Moral capitalism is possible; if not, its strictures are only a kind of misleading vanity, the rhetoric of a secular piety.
Stephen Young
#26. What we all want is public safety. We don't want rhetoric that's framed through ideology.
Kamala Harris
#27. I have nothing to fear from serious social studies of science, and I hope that my philosophy will help progressive science policies while showing that the most modern views of science are ignorant and regressive, even if they are accompanied by a leftist-sounding rhetoric.
Mario Bunge
#28. The end is so immense, it is its own poetry. It requires little rhetoric. Just state it plainly.
Philip Roth
#29. In every conflict, some rhetoric and posturing, so we should take that aside. When facts is that everybody is exhausted and that no one believes that there is a military solution to this. The solution must be a political one.
Staffan De Mistura
#30. The design of Rhetoric is to remove those Prejudices that lie in the way of Truth, to Reduce the Passions to the Government of Reasons; to place our Subject in a Right Light, and excite our Hearers to a due consideration of it.
Mary Astell
#31. Marco Rubio is a talented young man, but record trumps rhetoric.
Tom Ridge
#32. Alleged commitment to democracy and human rights is mere rhetoric, directly contrary to actual policy.
Noam Chomsky
#33. Humans and their governments have effectively neutered the population to the point that they're just skinbags, mouth-breathers and pseudo-intellectuals repeating political, religious or academic rhetoric that they don't even understand!
Brad McKinniss
#34. The answers lie in not just hard science or philosophical rhetoric but in experiments of the imagination as well. Human perspective must be re-examined through an almost whimsical fount of imagination of species, magic, and clear creative thinking.
Leviak B. Kelly
#35. It was amazing really, how many of these people used the same rhetoric when justifying themselves.
Mark E. Cooper
#36. Reagonomics - a blend of monetarism and fiscal Keynesianism swathed in classical liberal and supply-side rhetoric - is in no way going to solve the problem of inflationary depression or of the business cycle.
Murray Rothbard
#37. If you stand on a soapbox and trade rhetoric with a dictator you never win.
Mel Brooks
#38. What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study.
Henry David Thoreau
#39. So the - the part of the problem is not just the rhetoric. It's the fact that we - we're so polarized in what we've done to each other as parties over the last thirty years in redistricting that it's very, very hard to overcome your own constituencies and move to the middle.
Howard Dean
#40. I'm exposing faultlines, dealing especially with rhetoric. Showing that heterosexuality is a disease, or at least its inheritance.
Kate Zambreno
#41. Wherever there is persuasion, there is rhetoric, and wherever there is rhetoric, there is meaning.
Kenneth Burke
#42. There is practically no area of business where the difference between rhetoric and actuality is greater than in the handling of people.
John Harvey-Jones
#43. It is astonishing how articulate one can become when alone and raving at a radio. Arguments and counter arguments, rhetoric and bombast flow from one's lips like scurf from the hair of a bank manager.
Stephen Fry
#44. I still think people like to hear from someone's heart and how they really feel than the old political rhetoric trying to not say the wrong thing because how would it look, would they get votes, lose votes.
Joe Arpaio
#45. There comes a time when what is needed is not just rhetoric, but boots on the ground.
Baldwin Spencer
#47. North Korea's whole idea is to create a crisis to solve a crisis. They're so poor and they're so desperate that they realize that this bombastic rhetoric can drive the South Korean stock market down and get the U.S. in a tizzy. And it's a game they've been playing for many, many years.
Barbara Demick
#48. Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.
Francis Bacon
#49. 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
#50. Time in the heart and sequence in the brain
Such as destroyed Rimbaud and fooled Verlaine.
And let us then take godhead by the neck
And strangle it, and with it, rhetoric.
Conrad Aiken
#51. There is nothing quite as destructive to the gospel of Jesus Christ as the use of language that dismisses the way Jesus talks and prays and takes up instead the rhetoric of smiling salesmanship or vicious invective.
Eugene H. Peterson
#52. We must promote solid traits such as work ethics, a dignified lifestyle, matching actions to rhetoric, performance rather than grandstanding.
Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo
#54. Being Muslim has become synonymous with pointed questions, with tension and mistrust, even with conflict. It has become a global phenomenon with profound consequences for inter-communal relations, political rhetoric and policies at the local, regional, national and international level.
Tariq Ramadan
#55. Language kills, and inflamed rhetoric of the kind that spews almost daily from the lips of Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, and others running for public office in this country should be condemned.
Jay Parini
#56. Like a rough orator, that brings more truth Than rhetoric, to make good his accusation.
Philip Massinger
#57. Vulgarism in language is the distinguishing characteristic of bad company, and a bad education. A man of fashion avoids nothing with more care than that. Proverbial expressions, and trite sayings, are the flowers of the rhetoric of vulgar man.
Lord Chesterfield
#58. The figures of rhetoric are the beauties of all poems we have ever read. Without them we would merely be us: eating, sleeping, manufacturing, and dying. With them everything can be glorious. For though we have nothing to say, we can at least say it well.
Mark Forsyth
#59. The rhetoric on the Hill is getting very heated and it's getting quite dangerous. The gun is at the head of the American economy and Congress is holding it and its got a hair trigger. We've got to pay our bills.
Peter Welch
#60. There is a limit to the success of conservative populism and the exploitation of "little guy" or "silent majority" rhetoric, and it is very often reached because of the emaciated, corrupted personalities of the demagogues themselves.
Christopher Hitchens
#61. If Americans want to see results instead of rhetoric, if taxpayers would like solutions instead of sound bites, and hard work instead of horse trading, I suggest you take a short look, and it won't take much longer, at the accomplishments of this Congress.
Alcee Hastings
#62. I still write in literary Arabic but I try to rid it of the rhetoric, the symbolism, and the stuff that ordinary people don't understand.
Hassan Blasim
#63. I bless the gods for not letting my education in rhetoric, poetry, and other literary studies come easily to me, and thereby sparing me from an absorbing interest in these subjects.
Marcus Aurelius
#64. When we walk away from global warming, Kyoto, when we are irresponsibly slow in moving toward AIDS in Africa, when we don't advance and live up to our own rhetoric and standards, we set a terrible message of duplicity and hypocrisy.
John F. Kerry
#65. In America right now, we use words like 'smart' to talk about bombs. American rhetoric is grounded in ideas of capital-G Good, capital-E Evil, and it's very clear who is on which side. But in a book you can do just the opposite. You can use all lower-case words.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#66. Yiddish has a down-to-earth quality that makes it remote from high-flown rhetoric, and it has a catch-as-catch-can charm derived from its stunning variety-of syntax, spelling, pronunciation, and vocabulary-from region to region.
Israel Shenker
#68. Like so many before him who have ruined countries around the world, Obama has a greatly inflated idea of his own capabilities and the capabilities off what can be accomplished by rhetoric or even by political power.
Thomas Sowell
#69. The business and design of the Royal Society is: To improve the knowledge of naturall things, and all useful Arts, Manufactures, Mechanic practices, Engines and Inventions by Experiments-(not meddling with Divinity, Metaphysics, Moralls, Politicks, Grammar, Rhetoric or Logick).
Robert Hooke
#70. My campaign confirmed my belief that although there are bigots in America, whose hateful rhetoric seizes the media's attention, the vast majority of people do not harbor such prejudice.
Edward Brooke
#71. The rhetoric is the key to the character. It's the verbal music of the piece.
Peter Shaffer
#72. I've always thought stand-up comedians were the oral storytellers of our time, because they know rhetoric, they know delivery, they know timing, they know all of these things that you can only learn by telling a story out loud and interacting with an audience.
Chuck Palahniuk
#73. Rhetoric can be razor sharp, and just as one needs to take some comments seriously, others should not be.
Alexander Stubb
#74. I condemn all statements - made in sincerity or jest - that threaten or suggest the use of violence against the president of the United States or any other public official. Such rhetoric cannot and will not be tolerated.
Paul Broun
#75. That the poor are invisible is one of the most important things about them. They are not simply neglected and forgotten as in the old rhetoric of reform; what is much worse, they are not seen.
Michael Harrington
#76. Sometime rhetoric was just
another way to lie and impress persons,
and he knew this
Haidji
#77. History is laden with belligerent leaders using humanitarian rhetoric to mask geopolitical aims. History also shows how often ill-informed moralism has led to foreign entanglements that do more harm than good.
Samantha Power
#78. Israel deserves America's friendship in reality - not just in rhetoric.
Eric Cantor
#79. HANNAH: Don't let Bernard get to you. It's only performance art, you know. Rhetoric, they used to teach it in ancient times, like PT. It's not about being right, they had philosophy for that. Rhetoric was their chat show. Bernard's indignation is a sort of aerobics for when he gets on television.
Tom Stoppard
#80. The difference between poetry and rhetoric
is being ready to kill
yourself
instead of your children.
Audre Lorde
#81. People want guidance, not rhetoric. They need to know what the plan of action is, and how it will be implemented. They want to be given responsibility to help solve the problem and authority to act on it.
Howard Schultz
#82. During his runs for the GOP presidential nomination, Mitt Romney has done a good job of mimicking Reagan's anti-government diatribes and 'better days ahead' rhetoric.
Jackson Katz
#83. I think in the heat of emotions, some rhetoric is said that is a little explosive.
Tommy Thompson
#84. Of course, logic is not the only tool used in debate, and it is helpful to be cognizant of the others. Rhetoric likely tops the list, followed by concepts such as the "burden of proof" and Occam's razor.
Ali Almossawi
#85. Every human being deserves something better than having their lives dismissed in a flood of simplistic rhetoric, posturing and crass political point-scoring.
Munjed Al Muderis
#86. ... the way people understood things had a lot to do with the way people were, how they had been shaped, what the wanted; tricks of rhetoric would not shift them.
Ian McEwan
#88. We really don't have a policy [on climate change]. There's a lot of rhetoric and not a lot of action.
Mark Udall
#89. Political elites look increasingly interchangeable: Blair, Brown, and Cameron have all tried to provide cover for the surrender of sovereignty to foreign investors with invocations of 'British' values, and, more opportunistically, anti-immigrant rhetoric.
Pankaj Mishra
#90. I've heard a lot of nasty rhetoric about the president. We're going to kick your rear end out of the White House and stuff. That's just not the way I behave.
John Kasich
#91. If you get beyond the political rhetoric [and assembled a group to solve Social Security] it would take them 15 minutes. It would take them 15 minutes only because 10 minutes was used for pleasantries.
Alan Greenspan
#93. I come from a world where accountability and accomplishments matter, and where titles and rhetoric take a back seat to results.
Carly Fiorina
#94. There is no gay leader anywhere near the stature of Martin Luther King, because black activism drew on the profound spiritual tradition of the church, to which gay political rhetoric is childishly hostile.
Camille Paglia
#95. I believe all Americans need to start taking more responsibility for the kind of extreme rhetoric that is permeating our political culture; otherwise, quite frankly, as a country we're screwed.
Meghan McCain
#96. ...while cleverness is appropriate to rhetoric, and inventiveness to poetry, truth alone is appropriate to history.
Procopius Of Caesarea
#97. A commonplace of political rhetoric has it that the quality of a civilization may be measured by how it cares for its elderly. Just as surely, the future of a society may be forecast by how it cares for its young.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
#98. Today's misery is real unemployment, home foreclosures and bankruptcies. This is the Obama Misery Index and its at a record high. Its going to take more than new rhetoric to put Americans back to work - its going to take a new president.
Mitt Romney
#99. A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would rather be a man who plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric ...
Thomas Huxley
#100. It's remarkable to watch the president, with all the weight of his ability to command rhetoric with the bully pulpit behind him, make a clear speech about climate change and why that's so important for us all to focus on. And that is a rather remarkable thing to see. It's enormously powerful.
Josh Fox
