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
Nothing is so unbelievable that oratory cannot make it acceptable. — Marcus Tullius Cicero
Oratory is the power of beating down your adversary's arguments and putting better in their place. — Samuel Johnson
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
Wherever there is persuasion, there is rhetoric, and wherever there is rhetoric, there is meaning. — Kenneth Burke
At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. — Frederick Douglass
A speech is poetry: cadence, rhythm, imagery, sweep! A speech reminds us that words, like children, have the power to make dance the dullest beanbag of a heart. — Peggy Noonan
I must say I'm not very fond of oratory that's so full of energy it hasn't any room for facts. — Sinclair Lewis
Arguments out of a pretty mouth are unanswerable. — Joseph Addison
If practice makes perfect, and no one's perfect, then why practice? — Sayings
How many roads must a man walk down.. Before you can call him a Man. — Bob Dylan
What have the Romans ever done for us? — John Cleese
How many elephants have been stung by scorpions. — Moroccan Proverbs
Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric. — Thomas Sowell
How many roads must a man walk down? — Douglas Adams
Fear requires belief that you will be harmed, and it is easily manipulated by rhetoric. — Martha C. Nussbaum
Envy plus rhetoric equals "social justice.". — Thomas Sowell
we have let rhetoric do the job of poetry. — Cherrie Moraga
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. — William Butler Yeats
Rhetorical Image Quotes
Are Quotes
One day you will ask me which is more important? My life or yours? I will say mine and you will walk away not knowing that you are my life. — Kahlil Gibran
A true friend is someone who thinks that you are a good egg even though he knows that you are slightly cracked. — Bernard Meltzer
Always remember you are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, smarter than you think and twice as beautiful as you'd ever imagined. Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself — Rumi
Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom. — Charles Spurgeon
Candidates With Deeply Held Christian Beliefs Are Unfit and Disqualified From Serving As A Federal Judge. — Charles Schumer
All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us? — John Cleese
What is in the air there in Washington, what is in the water? What is wrong with them? This is not a rhetorical question. I think it is unspoken question No.1 as Americans look at so many of the individuals in our government. What is wrong with them? — Peggy Noonan
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
There can be little question that good composition is far less dependent upon acquaintance with its laws, than upon practice and natural aptitude. A clear head, a quick imagination, and a sensitive ear, will go far towards making all rhetorical precepts needless. — Herbert Spencer
Can I ask you a personal question"? Of all the rhetorical questions in the world, that is the one which irritates me most with its simultaneous gesture towards and denial of the trespass that is about to follow. — Kamila Shamsie
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
All rhetorical questions are accusations. — David Mamet
When will all the rhetorical questions end? — George Carlin
So I want to ask you a hypothetical question. My favorite kind. Next to rhetorical ones. I can nap equally well through either kind. — Orson Scott Card
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
Political Rhetoric Quotes
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
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
Politics is still crucially important. Our choices are vital, and we've got to make them and not just say, 'Oh they're all the same.' They are all the same in certain ways, alas - a political animal is such an animal. — Dennis Potter
It is truly a triumph of rhetoric over reality when people can believe that going into politics is 'public service,' but that producing food, shelter, transportation, or medical care is not. — Thomas Sowell
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
Do the rhetorical quarrels of bourgeois political parties have anything to do with the interests of the humble and downtrodden? — Mario Vargas Llosa
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
One sees a trend in our political and legal cultures toward treating religious beliefs as arbitrary and unimportant, a trend supported by a rhetoric that implies that there is something wrong with religious devotion. — Stephen L. Carter
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
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
Great powers of all persuasions care deeply about their survival, and there is always the danger in a bipolar or multipolar system that they will be attacked by another great power. In these circumstances, liberal great powers regularly dress up their hard-nosed behavior with liberal rhetoric. They talk like liberals and act like realists. Should they adopt liberal policies that are at odds with realist logic, they invariably come to regret it. — John Mearsheimer
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
I do think that tonal element of Trump's is attractive, but I don't know if I would go so far as to say the confrontational element of his rhetoric is necessarily attractive. — James David Vance
Many rightist movements, refraining from hyperinflammatory rhetoric or arming vigilante “brotherhoods” to combat leftists and Jews and assassinate public figures, were considerably less volatile than the Union of the Russian People. — Stephen Kotkin
Rhetoric is rooted in an essential function of language itself, a function that is wholly realistic and continually born anew: the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols. — Kenneth Burke
Stay in your lane is the most anti-intellectual, anti-progress rhetoric I’ve ever heard. Go outside of your lane. Far outside of it. Live there for a while. Tell us what you see. — Max Lugavere
My strong point is not rhetoric , it isn't showmanship, it isn't big promises - those things that create the glamour and the excitement that people call charisma and warmth. — Richard M. Nixon
My speaking style was criticised by no less an authority than Arnold Schwarzenegger. It was a low moment, my friends, to have my rhetorical skills denounced by a monosyllabic Austrian cyborg. — Boris Johnson
I say that now we see a lot of hateful rhetoric against Mexicans and the Latino community, but we have a very powerful weapon. And that is our vote. This is the way we can get even with all of the politicians who are insulting us and saying terrible things about our community - by voting them out. And get the good ones. Vote them in. — Dolores Huerta
The surrealist thinks he has outstripped the whole of literary history when he has written (here a word that there is no need to write) where others have written "jasmines, swans and fauns." But what he has really done has been simply to bring to light another form of rhetoric which hitherto lay hidden in the latrines. — Jose Ortega y Gasset
I come from a place that likes grandeur; it likes large gestures; it is not inhibited by flourish; it is a rhetorical society; it is a society of physical performance; it is a society of style. — Derek Walcott
Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts. — Jeremy Bentham
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
The death penalty is a poor person's issue. Always remember that: after all the rhetoric that goes on in the legislative assemblies, in the end, when the deck is cast out, it is the poor who are selected to die in this country. — Helen Prejean
Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This claim is rhetorical nonsense. — Stephen Jay Gould
It seems to me we have been in a rhetorical arms race in this country, with each side unwilling to lay down its weapons for fear - usually justified - the other side would beat them to a pulp. — Pat Sajak
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
The niftiest turn of phrase, the most elegant flight of rhetorical fancy, isn't worth beans next to a clear thought clearly expressed. — Jeff Greenfield
I come from a world where accountability and accomplishments matter, and where titles and rhetoric take a back seat to results. — Carly Fiorina
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
You don't defend national sovereignty with flags, cheap election rhetoric, and advertising campaigns. — Stephen Harper
The flag of the United States has not been created by rhetorical sentences in declarations of independence and in bills of rights. It has been created by the experience of a great people, and nothing is written upon it that has not been written by their life. It is the embodiment, not of a sentiment, but of a history. — Woodrow Wilson
The enemy is not fundamentalism; it is intolerance. In this case, the intolerance is perverse since it masquerades under the "liberal" rhetoric of "equal time." But mistake it not. — Stephen Jay Gould
Rhetoric, which is the use of language to inform or persuade, is very important in shaping public opinion. We are very easily fooled by language and how it is used by others. — Ray Comfort
When liberals finally grasped the strength of popular feeling about the family, they cried to appropriate the rhetoric and symbolism of family values for their own purposes. — Christopher Lasch
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
In Conclusion
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