Rhetorician Quotes & Sayings

The Orator persuades and carries all with him, he knows not how; the Rhetorician can prove that he ought to have persuaded and carried all with him. — Thomas Carlyle

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

It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician demonstrative proofs. — Aristotle.

As the base rhetorician uses language to increase his own power, to produce converts to his own cause, and to create loyal followers of his own person so the noble rhetorician uses language to wean men away from their inclination to depend on authority, to encourage them to think and speak clearly, and to teach them to be their own masters. — Thomas Szasz

I have to ask, sir ... Why does it have to be done like this?"
Vetinari smiled. "Can you keep a secret, Mister Lipwig?"
"Oh, yes, sir. I've kept lots."
"Capital. And the point is, so can I. You do not need to know. — Terry Pratchett

Then, when the rhetorician is more persuasive than the physician, the ignorant is more persuasive with the ignorant than he who has knowledge? - is not that the inference? — Plato

Carlyle, a man of strong words and attitudes, a rhetorician out of necessity, constantly aroused by the craving for a strong faithas well as by the feeling of an incapacity for it (Min this respect a typical romantic!) ... Fundamentally, Carlyle is an English atheist who makes it a point of honor not to be one. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Fathers be good to your daughters. Daughters will love like you do. Girls become lovers who turn in mothers. So, mothers be good to your daughters too. — John Mayer

I didn't feel any remorse or sympathy if I injured a rival. I went over the top a few times but I never broke anyone's leg. — Peter Storey

Rousseau (I'll note with your permission)
Could not conceive how solemn Grimm
Dared clean his nails in front of him,
The madcap sage and rhetorician.
Champion of rights and liberty,
In this case judged wrong-headedly.
One still can be a man of action
And mind the beauty of one's nails:
Why fight the age's predilection?
Custom's a despot and prevails. — Alexander Pushkin

And what is life without the company of wine, women and good weather. — Avijeet Das

Breathe. It's only a bad day, not a bad life — Ashley Purdy

None but those who have learned the art of subjecting their senses as well as reason to hypothetical systems can be persuaded by the most specious rhetorician that the lots of life are equal; yet it cannot be denied that every one has his peculiar pleasures and vexations, that external accidents operate variously upon different minds, and that no man can exactly judge from his own sensations what another would feel in the same circumstances. — Samuel Johnson

I've got huge tubs full of X-Files memorobilia that I can sell on eBay. — David Duchovny

A saint is a person who gives of themself without asking for anything in return. That's how simple it is to be a saint. Try it! Try being a saint. — Edward James Olmos

A sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination that can at all times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign an opponent and to glorify himself. — Benjamin Disraeli

And in the same spirit should each person receive what we say: for the man of education will seek exactness so far in each subject as the nature of the thing admits, it being plainly much the same absurdity to put up with a mathematician who tries to persuade instead of proving, and to demand strict demonstrative reasoning of a Rhetorician. — Aristotle.

I write poetry anyway and have for years and years. For me, putting fiction and poetry together is like the best of both worlds. — Ellen Hopkins

Ayn Rand is a rhetorician who writes novels I have never been able to read. — Gore Vidal

I wish you a very merry Christmas filled with abundance and a magnificent magical New Year. — Debasish Mridha

We know next to nothing with any certainty about Pythagoras, except that he was not really called Pythagoras. The name by which he is known to us was probably a nickname bestowed by his followers. According to one source, it meant 'He who spoke truth like an oracle'. Rather than entrust his mathematical and philosophical ideas to paper, Pythagoras is said to have expounded them before large crowds. The world's most famous mathematician was also its first rhetorician. — Daniel Tammet

The Bible is chock-a-block with such unnecessary but beautiful antitheses. God, whatever his other failings, is a great rhetorician. — Mark Forsyth

The rhetorician need not know the truth about things; he has only to discover some way of persuading the ignorant that he has more knowledge than those who know. — Plato

I have an enormous fondness for delicious food. It's very comforting. — Teri Garr

The sheer act of listening speaks volumes that even a great speech can't communicate. — John C. Maxwell

I no more thought of style or literary excellence than the mother who rushes into the street and cries for help to save her children from a burning house, thinks of the teachings of the rhetorician or the elocutionist. — Harriet Beecher Stowe

To lose time in the manufacture of cut-and-dried constitutions is, in consequence, a puerile task, the useless labour of an ignorant rhetorician. Necessity and time undertake the charge of elaborating constitutions when we are wise enough to allow these two factors to act — Gustave Le Bon

I feel genuinely sorry for those who are so blinded by narrow partisanship that they cannot appreciate Limbaugh's energy, intelligence and satiric skill. They live in a box with bags over their heads. Though he and I hardly agree on politics (I voted for Ralph Nader last year and may go Green again in 2004), I respect Limbaugh as a political analyst and deft rhetorician who is a master of the microphone and who knows how to engage and challenge a vast audience. — Camille Paglia

These things I sample, or clip, are things that we share - music, films, sounds. It triggers a layer of participation from the audience as they recognize the material and remember it. — Christian Marclay

Apt analogies are among the most formidable weapons of the rhetorician. — Winston Churchill

If you're looking for the origins of film culture in America, look no further than Amos Vogel. — Martin Scorsese

For it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs. — Aristotle.

The complete man, then, is the "lover" added to the scientist; the rhetorician to the dialectician. — Richard M. Weaver

A sophisticated rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity. — Benjamin Disraeli

That's something that annoys the hell out of me- I mean if somebody says the coffee's all ready and it isn't — J.D. Salinger

Churchill was a brilliant and inspiring rhetorician, but one of the first things he did as the head of the British nation was to put German Jews in jail. Tens of thousands of Jews - who had just been fortunate enough to get out from under Hitler only a few years before - spent the entire war in jail. — Nicholson Baker

In any piece of rhetorical discourse, one rhetorical term overcomes another rhetorical term only by being nearer to the term which stands ultimate. There is some ground for calling a rhetorical education necessarily aristocratic education in that the rhetorician has to deal with an aristocracy of notions. — Richard M. Weaver

I died so I could live on. — Tina Lindegaard