Old Rhetoric Quotes & Sayings

Mediocrity is no answer to violence. In fact, it probably invites violence. At least the mediocre and the violent appear together as in the old Western movies - the ruffian outlaw band shooting up main street and the little white church with the little white schoolteacher wringing her hands. To cool violence you need rhythm, humor, tempering; you need dance and rhetoric. Not therapeutic understanding. — James Hillman

Every major power always seeks to justify its action on moral grounds. Such behaviour is almost as old as the hills. The west has been a particularly vigorous exponent of this credo; and there is no reason to believe that China, for example, will be any different. But behind the moral rhetoric invariably lies interest and ideology. — Martin Jacques

I think we're raising whole generations who regard facts as more or less optional.
We have kids in elementary school who are being urged to take stands on political issues, to write letters to congressmen and presidents about nuclear energy.
They're not a decade old, and they're being thrown these kinds of questions that can absorb the lifetime of a very brilliant and learned man. And they're being taught that it's important to have views, and they're not being taught that it's important to know what you're talking about.
It's important to hear the opposite viewpoint, and more important to learn how to distinguish why viewpoint A and viewpoint B are different, and which one has the most evidence or logic behind it. They disregard that. They hear something, they hear some rhetoric, and they run with it. — Thomas Sowell

Science is the only true guide in life. — Mustafa Kemal Ataturk

My philosophy is that I am a friend of the children. I don't think anyone should see them as pitiable subjects or charity. That is old people's rhetoric. People often relate childish behaviour to stupidity or foolishness. This mindset needs to change. I want to level the playing field where I can learn from the children. Something I can learn from children is transparency. They are innocent, straightforward, and have no biases. I relate children to simplicity and I think that my friendship with children has a much deeper meaning than others. — Kailash Satyarthi

The summer morn is bright and fresh, the birds are darting by. As if they loved to breast the breeze that sweeps the cool clear sky. — William C. Bryant

The rhetoric of this masked master is one of the tolerance of difference. What better way to keep people in tow, hold them in the same old line of the same, than to console them with the noble lie of difference — Anonymous

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

I know black women in Tennessee who have worked all their lives, from the time they were twelve years old to the day they died. These women don't listen to the women's liberation rhetoric because they know that it's nothing but a bunch of white women who had certain life-styles and who want to change those life-styles. — Wilma Rudolph

It's kind of hard to find something that will get your juices flowing if you're somewhat critical. I have a hard time finding great things for myself in '94 and certainly in '95. — Dick Latvala

The Pakistanis are straightforward and sometimes extremely stupid. The Indians are more devious, sometimes so smart that we fall for their line. — Richard M. Nixon

If you paid me for work," continued Max, whose rhetoric was more sophisticated than you might expect from a man with food in his beard, "I wouldn't have to feel worthless. There's not law says old people have to feel worthless all the while, you know. You paid me, I'd have some dignity."
Now it was Mile's turn to nod and smile agreeably. "I think the dignity ship set sail a long time ago, Dad. — Richard Russo

In other words, to see if through these cultural phenomena a new Middle Ages is to take shape, a time of secular mystics, more inclined to monastic withdrawal than to civic participation. We should see how much, as antidote or as antistrophe, the old techniques of reason may apply, the arts of the Trivium, logic, dialectic, rhetoric. As we suspect that anyone who goes on stubbornly practicing them will be accused of impiety. — Umberto Eco

These were the Sophists, and their interest was in teaching the use of argumentative skills of the sort previous philosophers had exhibited, but as a means of attaining worldly success, for instance in politics. Unfortunately, they gained a reputation for being rather cynical and unscrupulous in their argumentative standards: any old argument would do as long as it persuaded one's listener, even if it was totally fallacious; what mattered was winning the debate, not arriving at the truth, and the line between logic and rhetoric was thus blurred. (The Sophists are still with us. Today we call them "lawyers," "professors of literary criticism," and "Michael Moore.") — Edward Feser

He uses the nice old words so rich in tradition to be sure I know he means it. — Frank Herbert

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

He spoke a kind of ecclesiastical jargon; a debased rhetoric that explained nothing but brought the truth into disrepute. It begged all the questions and answered none. The massive structure of reason and revelation on which the church was founded was reduced to ritual incantation, formless, fruitless and essentially false. Peppermint piety. It deceived no one but the man who peddled it. It satisfied no one but old ladies and girls in green-sickness; yet it flourished most rankly where the Church was most firmly entrenched in the established order. It was the mark of accommodation, compromise, laxity among the clergy, who find it easier to preach devotion than to affront the moral and social problems of the time. It covered fatuity and lack of education. It left people naked and unarmed in the face of terrifying mysteries: pain, passion, death and the great perhaps of the hereafter. — Morris L. West

Face the facts. Then act on them. It's the only mantra I know, the only doctrine I have to offer you, and it's harder than you'd think, because I swear humans seem hardwired to do anything but. Face the facts. Don't pray, don't wish, don't buy into centuries-old dogma and dead rhetoric. Don't give in to your conditioning or your visions or your fucked-up sense of ... whatever. Face the facts. Then act. QUELLCRIST — Richard K. Morgan

I felt vibration as my shield began to plow through Coral's upper atmosphere; Asshole rather unhelpfully chimed in that we had begun to experience turbulence. — John Scalzi

Life is too short to be reading shitty books. — Unknown Author 386

Ever since 1945 the federal government has held and indeed increased its importance as the first customer of the American economy. Government spending had been the primary economic stimulant and to increase it had been the goal of hundreds of interest groups; hopes of balanced budgets and cheap, business-like administration always ran aground upon this fact. What was more, the United States was a democracy; whatever the doctrinaire objections to it, and however much rhetoric might be devoted to attacking it, a welfare state slowly advanced because voters wanted it that way. These facts gradually made the old ideal of totally free enterprise, unchecked and uninvaded by the influence of government, unreal. — J.M. Roberts

Without peanuts, it isn't a cocktail party. — Julia Child

[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

Hi! My little hut
Is newly-thatched I see ...
Blue morning-glories — Kobayashi Issa

In money-lenders' capital the form M-C-M is reduced to the two extremes without a mean, M-M , money exchanged for more money, a form that is incompatible with the nature of money, and therefore remains inexplicable from the standpoint of the circulation of commodities. Hence Aristotle: since chrematistic is a double science, one part belonging to commerce, the other to economic, the latter being necessary and praiseworthy, the former based on circulation and with justice disapproved (for it is not based on Nature, but on mutual cheating), therefore the usurer is most rightly hated, because money itself is the source of his gain, and is not used for the purposes for which it was invented. — Karl Marx

Is a wound we keep tucked in those parts of the country that can't afford to turn it away, who need its jobs or revenue, who must endure the quiet violence of its physical presence - its "Don't Pick Up Hitchhikers" warning signs, its barbed fences - the same way a place must endure the removal of its mountaintops and the plundering of its seams: because a powerful rhetoric insists we can only be delivered from our old scars by tolerating new ones. — Leslie Jamison

Every little move the dog made had me guessing which direction it would go. I had been through many fights, so I was getting good at this.
But my heart was always filled with sadness. How long was Yuka going to make me do this? I didn't really want to kill anything. All my life, I'd never thought my jaws were meant to be used this way. — Otsuichi

Must you write complete sentences each time, every time? Perish the thought. If your work consists only of fragments and floating clauses, the Grammar Police aren't going to come and take you away. Even William Strunk, that Mussolini of rhetoric, recognized the delicious pliability of language. "It is an old observation," he writes, "that the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric." Yet he goes on to add this thought, which I urge you to consider: "Unless he is certain of doing well, [the writer] will probably do best to follow the rules." — Stephen King

Even Holland and Spain have been positively, though not relatively, advancing. — Thomas B. Macaulay

Mine is the sultry sunset when the skies
Tremble with strange, intolerable thunder:
And at the dead of an hushed night, these eyes
Draw down the soaring oracles winged with wonder — Lionel Pigot Johnson

The cause of my profound sense of incompatibility with others is, I believe, that most people think with their feelings, whereas I feel with my thoughts.
For the ordinary man, to feel is to live, and to think is to know how to live. For me, to think is to live, and to feel is merely food for thought. — Fernando Pessoa

It is an old observation that the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric. When they do so, however, the reader will usually find in the sentence some compensating merit, attained at the cost of the violation. Unless he is certain of doing as well, he will probably do best to follow the rules. After he has learned, by their guidance, to write plain English adequate for everyday uses, let him look, for the secrets of style, to the study of the masters of literature. — William Strunk Jr.

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

When you let go of fear and the need to control, you'll experience how mysterious, sacred, and interesting Life can be. — Melody Beattie