Rhetoric Quotes

Tell someone to do something, and you change their life–for a day; tell someone a story and you change their life.

~ N.t. Wright

Lyndon Johnson’s sentences were the sentences of a man with a remarkable gift for words, not long words but evocative, of a man with a remarkable gift for images, homey images of a vividness that infused the sentences with drama.

~ Robert A. Caro

He was a stylist, not a thinker. He spent time trying to say things in as complicated a way as possible.

~ Peter Heather

he knew, unlike most reporters, how to use pauses and the absence of words as effectively as the words themselves.

~ David Halberstam

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

~ Harvey Mansfield

I discovered that night (in his college's student politics) that an audience has a feel to it, and, in the parlance of the theater, that audience and I were together.

~ Ronald Reagan

Language is not law; it is in fact a lot like music. Speech is jazz – first you learn the basic rules, and then you become good enough to improvise all the time. Writing is somewhat more like classical composition, where established forms and conditions will hold greater sway.

~ Robert Lane Greene

Whether it's trying to convince others that something is more true, more virtuous, or more desirable--all communication is rhetoric in action.

~ Leonard Koren

Chinese immigrant: Americans make a mere practice of loving justice.

~ H.w. Brands

Their message is conveyed in that hortatory tone and declamatory voice used by politicians when starting a condition contrary to fact. People who aren't cowed don't spend a lot of time proclaiming they won't be cowed. Leaders who really have strengthened the voice of freedom don't don't need to reassure there electorates that they're committed to doing so.

~ William Kristol

When (an advocate) is not thoroughly acquainted with the real strength and weakness of his cause, he knows not where to choose the most impressive argument. When the mark is shrouded in obscurity, the only substitute for accuracy in the aim is in the multitude of the shafts.

~ John Quincy Adams

Since Shakespeare had a feel for revolutionary rhetoric, let’s all cry: “Peace, freedom and liberty!

~ Carl William Brown

He could be as memorable an orator as his father, particularly when he was speaking on that topic that had captured his imagination

~ ;Robert A. Caro

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

Another Mexican American in another class, approaches Victor after class, carrying his copy of Fahrenheit 451, required reading for the course. The student doesn't understand the reference to a salon. Victor explains that this is just another word for the living room. No understanding in the student's eyes. He tries Spanish: la salon. Still nothing. The student has grown up as a migrant worker. And Victor remembers the white student who had been in his class a quarter ago, who had written about not understanding racism, that there was none where he had grown up, in Wennatchee, that he has played with the children of his father's migrant workers without there being any hostility. His father's workers. Property. Property that doesn't know of living rooms. And Victor thought of what the man from Wennatchee knew, what the ROTC Mexican American knew, what the migrant worker knew. And he thought of getting up the next morning to go with Serena to St. Mary's for cheese and butter. And he knew there was something he was not doing in his composition classrooms.

~ Victor Villanueva

There is an expectation that we can talk about sins but no one must be identified as a sinner: newspapers love to describe words or deeds as “racially charged” even in those cases when it would be more honest to say “racist”; we agree that there is rampant misogyny, but misogynists are nowhere to be found; homophobia is a problem, but no one is homophobic. One cumulative effect of this policed language is that when someone dares to point out something as obvious as white privilege, it is seen as unduly provocative. Marginalized voices in America have fewer and fewer avenues to speak plainly about what they suffer; the effect of this enforced civility is that those voices are falsified or blocked entirely from the discourse.

~ Teju Cole

Lyndon Johnson knew how to make the most of such enthusiasm and how to play on it and intensify it. He wanted his audience to become involved. He wanted their hands up in the air. And having been a schoolteacher he knew how to get their hands up. He began, in his speeches, to ask questions.

~ Robert A. Caro

Metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with.

~ Milan Kundera

Lincoln learned to summon the passions, but he never addressed his audience as sweethearts.

~ Richard Brookhiser

We spend so much time bantering about the words when the real open conversations might very well be our actions. I worry about our rhetoric.

~ Anna Deavere Smith

[Rumsfield's] reply included a complex formulation that would become inextricably associated with him: 'There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.

~ Ian Leslie

There is hardly a better way to avoid discussion than by releasing an argument from the control of the present and by saying that only the future will reveal its merits.

~ Hannah Arendt

Talent for oratory can simulate the need for action and even thought.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

They were interchangeable tools, and the catchy phrases continued without abatement.

~ Robert A. Caro

It is this simplicity that makes the uneducated more effective than the educated when addressing popular audiences—makes them, as the poets tell us, 'charm the crowd's ears more finely.' Educated men lay down broad general principles; uneducated men argue from common knowledge and draw obvious conclusions.

~ Aristotle

[It is not] the poet's business to use verse as an advanced form of rhetoric, nor to give to political statements the aura of eternal truth.

~ George Oppen

The weaker the argument the louder and more frequent the rhetoric.

~ Ken Poirot

In science, the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs.

~ William Osler

the matter is as it is in all other cases: if it is naturally in you to be a good orator, a notable orator you will be when you have acquired knowledge and practice ...

~ Plato

From her character in the HBO miniseries: The art of politics is the art of applying the seat of the britches to the seat of the chair.

~ Abigail Adams

When you depart from standard usage, it should be deliberate and not an accidental lapse. Like a poet who breaks the rules of poetry for creative effect, this only works when you know and respect the rule you are breaking. If you have never heard of the rules you are breaking, you have no right to do so, and you are likely to come off like a buffoon or a barbarian. Breaking rules, using slang and archaic language can be effective, but it is just as likely to give you an audience busy with wincing.

~ N.d. Wilson

If rhetoric study was the military, grammar teachers would be the drill sergeants.

~ T.k. Naliaka

A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up the details...

~ George Orwell

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

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

Every president to hold office has espoused some version of Americanism - the truths that we hold self-evident, even when those truths are not always in evidence. But for all their grand rhetoric and mostly good deeds, none was able to seal the deal on the trifecta of equality, plurality and socioeconomic ascendancy. Obama has.

~ John Ridley

The rhetoric is the key to the character. It's the verbal music of the piece.

~ Peter Shaffer

President Obama is a gifted politician. He is gifted with rhetoric virtuosity. He is gifted with the ability to lie directly to camera without blinking. And he is gifted with some of the most incompetent conservative opposition in the history of the country.

~ Ben Shapiro

Power is the most persuasive rhetoric.

~ Friedrich Schiller

Rhetoric does not get you anywhere, because Hitler and Mussolini are just as good at rhetoric. But if you can bring these people down with comedy, they stand no chance.

~ Mel Brooks