And Rhetoric Quotes & Sayings

Stalin is one of the most extraordinary figures in world history. He began as a small clerk, and he has never stopped being a clerk. Stalin owes nothing to rhetoric. He governs from his office, thanks to a bureaucracy that obeys his every nod and gesture. It's striking that Russian propaganda, in the criticisms it makes of us, always holds itself within certain limits. Stalin, that cunning Caucasian, is apparently quite ready to abandon European Russia, if he thinks that a failure to solve her problems would cause him to lose everything. Let nobody think Stalin might reconquer Europe from the Urals! It is as if I were installed in Slovakia, and could set out from there to reconquer the Reich. This is the catastrophe that will cause the loss of the Soviet Empire. — Adolf Hitler

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

That is the great danger of meritocracy: the people who reach the top of the system are precisely the people who have most completely identified with the system and its demands, creating a vicious circle preventing any actual change. It is no accident that conservatives tend to employ the rhetoric of social mobility so readily, as social climbers generally do not ask questions about the ladder. — Adam Kotsko

White House officials acknowledge in broad terms that a president's time and public rhetoric are among his most valuable policy tools. — Barton Gellman

Obama had reached out to the business community, they just haven't liked all of his decisions and some of his rhetoric. But generally, I think the administration is quite open and accessible. — David Rubenstein

In spite of this, our table's status on the Oronsay continued to be minimal, while those at the Captain's Table were constantly toasting to one another's significance. That was a small lesson I learned on the journey. What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power. Nothing much of lasting value ever happens at the head table, held together by familiar rhetoric. Those who already have power continue to glide along in the familiar rut they have made for themselves. — Michael Ondaatje

I think strong rhetoric and strong action are two separate things. Anyone can use tough words. Anyone can go over the top and say things that sound strong. But sounding strong is not enough. You have to know exactly how you're going to do it. And if you look at some of the policies he's talked about, they would not make America stronger. — Marco Rubio

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

An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which Smith published in 1776, is the most important book ever written about capitalism and its moral ramifications. Though The Wealth of Nations is in good part about commerce, it was not written for businessmen or merchants. A book focused on the analysis of market processes motivated by self-interest, it was written by one of the most admired philosophers of the Enlightenment, a former professor of logic, rhetoric, jurisprudence, and moral philosophy, in order to influence politicians and rouse them to pursue the common good. — Jerry Z. Muller

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

De-Christianizing America has been high on the progressive agenda, and, thanks to the government (especially the federal courts), it has been a great success. Nor can we overlook the contribution of the entertainment industry, which now determines what passes for 'culture.' The main practical vehicle of de-Christianization has been the Sexual Revolution. A few radicals have called for the abolition of the family, but most liberals have been more discreet, avoiding hostile rhetoric while quietly but constantly pursuing policies that result in lower birthrates and fatherless children. — Joseph Sobran

Shorn of unattractive language about "robots" who will be producing taxes and not burglarizing homes, the general idea that schools in ghettoized communities must settle for a different set of goals than schools that serve the children of the middle class and upper middle class has been accepted widely. And much of the rhetoric of "rigor" and "high standards" that we hear so frequently, no matter how egalitarian in spirit it may sound to some, is fatally belied by practices that vulgarize the intellects of children and take from their education far too many of the opportunities for cultural and critical reflectiveness without which citizens become receptacles for other people's ideologies and ways of looking at the world but lack the independent spirits to create their own. — Jonathan Kozol

The voice of humility is God's music, and the silence of humility is God's rhetoric. — Francis Quarles

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

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

If nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come, nothing is more harmful than an idea which is manipulated by motivated men. Rogues and crooks have ideas. So do ordinary folks. But intellectuals are meant to be a breed apart for the same reason rocks aren't gems. — Mohammad Badrul Ahsan

The prime minister's final flourish, Honour your country, for the eyes of the country are upon you, complete with drumrolls and bungle blasts, unearthed from the attics of the mustiest of nationalistic rhetoric, was ruined by a Good night that rang entirely false, but then that is the great thing about ordinary words, they are incapable of deceit. — Jose Saramago

Carl Degler says (Out of Our Past): "No new social class came to power through the door of the American revolution. The men who engineered the revolt were largely members of the colonial ruling class." George Washington was the richest man in America. John Hancock was a prosperous Boston merchant. Benjamin Franklin was a wealthy printer. And so on. On the other hand, town mechanics, laborers, and seamen, as well as small farmers, were swept into "the people" by the rhetoric of the Revolution, by the camaraderie of military service, by the distribution of some land. Thus was created a substantial body of support, a national consensus, something that, even with the exclusion of ignored and oppressed people, could be called "America. — Howard Zinn

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

Nothing is text but what is spoken of in the Bible and meant there for person and place; the rest is application; which a discreet man may do well; but it is his scripture, not the Holy Ghost's. First, in your sermons use your logic, and then your rhetoric; rhetoric without logic is like a tree with leaves and blossoms, but no root. — John Selden

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

You, sir, what are the three kinds of particular rhetoric according to subject matter discussed?" But Phaedrus is prepared. "Forensic, deliberative and epideictic," he answers calmly. "What are the epideictic techniques?" "The technique of identifying likenesses, the technique of praise, that of encomium and that of amplification. — Robert M. Pirsig

At some point the rhetoric runs out, and we have to ask ourselves, 'Are we simply going to standby while somebody's rhetoric is good, but their actions are so lousy?' Are we going to stand up for that? — Matt Gonzalez

Analogy and probability are not bedrock; they are lifeboats in an ocean of doubt, and sometimes they founder. So rhetoric tends to the passionate:we argue, not with surety, but as the shipwrecked clinging to the only thing they have. — Andrew J. Patrick

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

My mother is not a woman of ordinary culture. She knows literature and speaks Spanish better than I do. She even corrected my poems and gave me advice when I was studying rhetoric. — Jose Rizal

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

The aspiration to such uniformity and order alerts us to the fact that modern statecraft is largely a project of internal colonization, often glossed, as it is in its imperial rhetoric, as a 'civilizing mission'. — James C. Scott

In book two of his Rhetoric,2 Aristotle identified and explained three means of persuasion that a speaker may use: logos, pathos, and ethos. Logos is the logical argumentation and patterns of reasoning used to effect persuasion. Pathos includes the emotional involvement of both the speaker and the audience as they achieve persuasion. Ethos refers to the character of the speaker — R. Larry Overstreet

You don't defend national sovereignty with flags, cheap election rhetoric, and advertising campaigns. — Stephen Harper

Wherever there is persuasion, there is rhetoric, and wherever there is rhetoric, there is meaning. — Kenneth Burke

True eloquence is irresistible. It charms by its images of beauty, it enforces an argument by its vehement simplicity. Orators whose speeches are "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," only prevail where truth is not understood, for knowledge and simplicity are the foundation of all true eloquence. Eloquence abounds in beautiful and natural images, sublime but simple conceptions, in passionate but plain words. Burning words appeal to the emotions as well as to the intellect; they stir the soul and touch the heart. — Albert Ellery Bergh

Rhetoric can be razor sharp, and just as one needs to take some comments seriously, others should not be. — Alexander Stubb

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

In rhetoric there are the unconditionally right and the unconditionally guilty; there is total victory and the annihilation of the opponent. In dialogue, annihilation of the opponent also annihilates the very dialogic sphere in which discourse lives... This sphere is very fragile and is easily destroyed... — Mikhail Bakhtin

Americans tend not to distinguish between political rhetoric and real intentions, which can lead to great misunderstanding. — Hooman Majd

President Obama's version of America is a divided one - pitting us against each other based on our income level, gender, and social status. His policies have failed! We are not better off than we were 4 years ago, and no rhetoric, bumper sticker, or campaign ad can change that. — Mia Love

The last generation's Religious Right activism was, to the contrary, the exact opposite, affirming and reaffirming that they were not a theological movement but a political one. The tent was broad enough to include evangelical Protestants, Roman Catholics, Latter-day Saints, Orthodox Jews, and even socially conservative agnostics and atheists.7 The rhetoric was focused much less on the kingdom of God or on the gospel of Christ than on "traditional family values" or "our Judeo-Christian heritage. — Russell D. Moore

The reading of the ancients awakened new delight in the melody and beauty of language: men became intoxicated with words. The practice of rhetoric was universal and it quickly coloured all literature. It — George Herbert Mair

Unquestionably, American political rhetoric can be repugnant, and the Right can certainly be as guilty as the Left. — John Podhoretz

Just as a state's police swear to prevent and punish murder, so the signers of the Genocide Convention [in 1948] swore to police a brave new world order. The rhetoric of moral utopia is a peculiar response to genocide. But those were heady days, just after the trials at Nuremberg, when the full scale of the Nazi extermination of Jews all over Europe had been recognized as a fact of which nobody could any longer claim ignorance. The authors and signers of the Genocide Convention knew perfectly well that they had not fought World War II to stop the Holocaust but rather
and often, as in the case of the United States, reluctantly
to contain fascist aggression. What made those victorious powers, which dominated the UN then even more than they do now, imagine that they would act differently in the future? — Philip Gourevitch

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

I think politicians do great things in the world, but I don't think they're the only ones who can. I don't like all the rhetoric and the finger pointing. — Lauren Bush

Riskier mortgage lending practices, imposed by government, were what set the stage for many mortgage payments to stop and thus for the financial disasters that followed. Political rhetoric, echoed in the media, seeks to obscure that painfully plain fact. — Thomas Sowell

Nationalism is a phenomenon of the world after the 1789 French Revolution; it implies a common consciousness created within a consolidated territory, usually involving a single language and shared culture, producing a public rhetoric of a single national will, and with the agenda of creating or reinforcing a unitary state. — Diarmaid MacCulloch

Racial rhetoric has been entwined with government from the start, all the way back to when the enemy was not Obamacare but the Grand Army of the Republic (and further in the past than that: Thomas Jefferson, after all, was derided as 'the Negro President'). — Rick Perlstein

Rhetoric is nothing but reason well dressed and argument put in order. — Jeremy Collier

So, to do right by a Gothic tale, let's be frank, requires that the author be a militant romantic who relates the action of his narratives in dreamy and more than usually emotive language. Hence, the well-known grandiose rhetoric of the Gothic tale, which may be understood by the sympathetic reader as not just an inflatable raft on which the imagination floats at its leisure upon waves of bombast, but also as the sails of the Gothic artist's soul filling up with the winds of ecstatic hysteria. So it's hard to tell someone how to write the Gothic tale, since one really has to be born to the task. Too bad. — Thomas Ligotti

He was a man with a chest, and he wanted to give thoughtful expression to the passion of his heart. — Harvey Mansfield

The unary Photograph has every reason to be banal, 'unity'
of composition being the first rule of vulgar (and notably, of academic) rhetoric: 'The subject,' says one handbook for amateur photographers, 'must be simple, free of useless accessories; this is called the Search for Unity. — Roland Barthes

Someone recently pointed out how much Barack Obama's style and strategies resemble those of Latin American charismatic despots - the takeover of industries by demagogues who never ran a business, the rousing rhetoric of resentment addressed to the masses and the personal cult of the leader promoted by the media. But do we want to become the world's largest banana republic? — Thomas Sowell

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

For the Christian one dislocating, self-impoverishing hour spent with a child living in a broken-down dump is worth more than all the burial mounds of rhetoric, all the enfeebled good intentions, all the mumbling and fumbling and tardiness of those Christians who are so busy cultivating their own holiness that they cannot hear the anguished cry of the child in the slum. — Brennan Manning

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

NATO bombing of Serbia was undertaken by the 'international community,' according to consistent Western rhetoric - although those who did not have their heads buried in the sand knew that it was opposed by most of the world, often quite vocally. Those who do not support the actions of wealth and power are not part of 'the global community. — Noam Chomsky

Those in whom the faculty of reason is predominant, and who most skillfully dispose their thoughts with a view to render them clear and intelligible, are always the best able to persuade others of the truth of what they lay down, though they should speak only in the language of Lower Brittany, and be wholly ignorant of the rules of rhetoric; and those whose minds are stored with the most agreeable fancies, and who can give expression to them with the greatest embellishment and harmony, are still the best poets, though unacquainted with the art of poetry. — Rene Descartes

Particularly black Americans, many of them, from quotes that I have seen and conversations I've had, are sort of insulted that the civil rights movement is being hijacked - the rhetoric of the civil rights movement is being hijacked for something like same sex marriage. Black Americans tend to have a higher degree of religiosity. — Gary Bauer

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

Tax rates for the wealthy should revert to Clinton-era levels, both because it is necessary for long-term deficit reduction and because fairness dictates it. Moreover, there is no proof that higher marginal rates dissuade investment, all the rhetoric from the Right notwithstanding. — Eliot Spitzer

Like the three points in a triangle, knowing your value, maintaining your value, and getting compensated for your value are essential in building professional stability and longevity. If the compensation or the opportunity sounds too good to be true - it probably is. Sooner or later, reality prevails over rhetoric. — Joe Jordan

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

The communication has evolved to such a degree that kids under 25 can connect to each other so quickly and so immediately that they really don't have the patience or understanding for inherited rhetoric. — Seth Green

We used to actually kill each other before we discovered rhetoric in words. If you look at other countries, there are people attacking each other in parliament and stuff. — Greg Gutfeld

The Greeks who rhapsodized about democracy in their rhetoric rarely created democratic institutions. A few cities such as Athens occasionally attempted a system vaguely akin to democracy for a few years. These cities functioned as slave societies and were certainly not egalitarian or democratic in the Indian sense. — Jack Weatherford

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

The antiquated rhetoric of 'having it all' disregards the basis of every economic relationship: the idea of trade-offs. All of us are dealing with the constrained optimization that is life, attempting to maximize our utility based on parameters like career, kids, relationships, etc., doing our best to allocate the resource of time. Due to the scarcity of this resource, therefore, none of us can 'have it all,' and those who claim to are most likely lying."1 — Sheryl Sandberg

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

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

To picture Roosevelt as a man at this time in his life - he felt he was old. He was 53 years old, feeling lonely and irrelevant. And all of a sudden, he takes on this campaign, and it becomes a crusade for popular government. And he ultimately goes on fire in the campaign, but he discovers he's up against all the old machine tactics that he used to use himself, and he has to let the public get involved. And he energizes the public through the most extreme kind of rhetoric, which truly brings him into the streets and onto his side. — Geoffrey Cowan

Of all the classes of men, I dislike the most those who make their livings by talking - actors, clergymen, politicians, pedagogues, and so on ... It is almost impossible to imagine a talker who sticks to the facts. Carried away by the sound of his own voice and the applause from the groundlings, he makes inevitably the jump from logic to mere rhetoric. — H.L. Mencken

However little president Obama knows or cares about economics, he knows a lot about politics - and especially political rhetoric. 'High-speed rail' is simply another set of loft words to justify continued expansion of government spending. So are words like 'investment in education' or 'investment' in any number of other things, which serves the same political purpose. — Thomas Sowell

But it does not require much effort to see that the dialogue in liberal democracy is of a peculiar kind because its aim is to maintain the domination of the mainstream and not to undermine it. A deliberation is believed to make sense only if the mainstream orthodoxy is sure to win politically. Today's 'dialogue' politics are a pure form of the right-is-might politics, cleverly concealed by the ostentatiously vacuous rhetoric of all-inclusiveness. — Ryszard Legutko

When [a man] thinks that he is reasoning he is really disputing, just because he cannot define and divide, and so know that of which he is speaking; and he will pursue a merely verbal opposition in the spirit of contention and not of fair discussion. — Plato

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

The change in rhetoric has constituted a revolution in how people view themselves and how they view the middle class, the Bourgeois Revaluation. People have become tolerant of markets and innovation. — Deirdre N. McCloskey

Politicians must be simple and clear about how their ideas will serve the national cause. We can no longer use the complexity of today's problems as an excuse for inaction, rhyme or rhetoric that does not meet the challenges before us. — Alan Siegel

In a world where people are divided by sex, race, religion, patriotism, nationality, bipartisanship, and so-called borders, we need more people who are genuine with others and perspicuous with the way the world actually works, despite all the labels and... rhetoric. We need people who are not bound by any specific creed, nation or state, but who subsume them all and are free to create and destroy the many symbols and ideas that float around them, while moving freely and open-mindedly through their social environment. If we would be authentic with our world we should be as resourceful and multi-layered as possible, cultivating a Renaissance spirit. The more abundant our intent, the more epic our presence will be. The more universal our love, the more authentic our journey will be. — Gary McGee

The only appropriate war rhetoric is more rhetoric that calls our enemies spirits and people with flesh the victims of this war. Satan wants us to fight with one another, and I understand that some evil must be restrained, but our war, the war of the ones who believe in Jesus, is a war unseen. If we could muster a portion of the patriotism we feel toward our earthly nations into patriotism and bravery in concert with the kingdom of God, the enemy would take fewer casualties. — Donald Miller

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

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

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

Sometime rhetoric was just
another way to lie and impress persons,
and he knew this — Haidji

The high ground of Christ & Him crucified must be claimed in our preaching. Any other footing is a slippery slope that inevitably descends downward into vain rhetoric and mere words. To the contrary, every pulpit must present a towering vision of the unique person and saving work of Jesus Christ. All preaching must point to His sin-bearing, substitutionary death for sinners. All exposition must lift up this Sacrificial Lamb who became a sin-bearing Substitute for all who believe. Every message must exalt this Christ, who was raised from the dead, exalted to the right hand of God the Father, and entrusted with all authority in heaven and earth. — Steven J. Lawson

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

All s, like all human beings, get many things wrong. Ronald Reagan's extraordinary achievement as of the U.S. was to succeed in getting the two biggest challenges of his time right: defeating the Soviet Union and reviving the American economy and spirit. Neither of those achievements was inevitable. Both were fiercely opposed at the time. But he persisted; his visionary focus matched only by a gentleness of character and a brilliance of rhetoric. — Andrew Sullivan

The whole struggle was over, and yet there seemed to have been no moment of victory. You might say, if you liked, that the power of choice had been simply set aside and an inflexible destiny substituted for it. On the other hand, you might say he had delivered from the rhetoric of his passions and had emerged in unassailable freedom. Ransom could not for the life of him, see any difference between these two statements. Predestination and freedom were apparently identical. He could no longer see any meaning in the many arguments he had heart on the subject. — C.S. Lewis

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

The problem with our "change the world" rhetoric is that it is too often a thinly veiled grasp for power and a quest for dominance - things that are antithetical to the way Jesus calls his disciples to live. — Brian Zahnd

Tolerance has come to mean that no one is right and no one is wrong and, indeed, the very act of stating that someone else's views are immoral or incorrect is now taken to be intolerant (of course, from this same point of view, it is all right to be intolerant of those who hold to objectively true moral or religious positions). Once the existence of knowable truth in religion and ethics is denied, authority (the right to be believed and obeyed) gives way to power (the ability to force compliance), reason gives way to rhetoric, the speech writer is replaced by the makeup man, and spirited but civil debate in the culture wars is replaced by politically correct special-interest groups who have nothing left but political coercion to enforce their views on others. — J.P. Moreland

The fault, of course, is not in religion, but in the fanatic of every religion. Fanaticism remains the greatest carrier of the spores of fear, and the rhetoric of religion, with the hysteria it so readily generates, is fast becoming the readiest killing device of contemporary times. — Wole Soyinka

These are the three things - volume of sound, modulation of pitch, and rhythm - that a speaker bears in mind. It is those who do bear them in mind who usually win prizes in the dramatic contests; and just as in drama the actors now count for more than the poets, so it is in the contests of public life, owing to the defects of our political institutions. — Aristotle.

Girl power reduces the theoretical complexity of feminism to a cheery slogan ("GIRLS KICK ASS!"); it represents the ultimate commodification of empowerment; it reinforces the simplistic conception of feminism as being, at heart, "all about choices." But most of all, it it grabbed the rhetoric from one of the most potentially powerful, yet woefully misunderstood, feminist uprisings of my generation, discarded every ounce of political heft, and reduced it to cheap iron-on letters on a baby T. — Rachel Fudge

What struck me as I began to study history was how nationalist fervor
inculcated from childhood on by pledges of allegiance, national anthems, flags waving and rhetoric blowing
permeated the educational systems of all countries, including our own. I wonder now how the foreign policies of the United States would look if we wiped out the national boundaries of the world, at least in our minds, and thought of all children everywhere as our own. Then we could never drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, or napalm on Vietnam, or wage war anywhere, because wars, especially in our time, are always wars against children, indeed our children. — Howard Zinn

The maxim, as has been already said, is a general statement, and people love to hear stated in general terms what they already believe in some particular connexion: e.g. if a man happens to have bad neighbors or bad children, he will agree with any one who tells him 'Nothing is more annoying than having neighbors,' or, 'Nothing is more foolish than to be the parent of children.' The orator has therefore to guess the subjects on which his hearers really hold views already, and what those views are, and then must express, as general truths, these same views on these same subjects. This is one advantage of using maxims. — Aristotle.

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

For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible — Arthur Schopenhauer

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

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. — Christian Smith

Children cannot eat rhetoric and they cannot be sheltered by commissions. I don't want to see another commission that studies the needs of kids. We need to help them. — Marian Wright Edelman

Women must find their own answer. That's the important thing. I'm no longer interested in books about women written by men. Even if I could believe in their objectivity, I just can't find their opinions relevant. Now I will only believe what a woman has to say about women, because even if it's not entirely true, it's her struggle and she's on the way to the answer.
Many of you seek masculine approval. Even though you have inside you your way of talking and writing, you have mountains of it inside you, and even though it is enough to begin expressing yourselves so long as it is with your vocabulary, your abstractions, and your own conceptualization, I think you are still afraid of the master: men. Of their judgment. As long as you have this fear, you will not progress. I think the future belongs to women. Men have been completely dethroned. Their rhetoric is stale, used up. We must move on the rhetoric of women, one that is anchored in the organism, in the body. — Marguerite Duras