Rhetoric Quotes - Page 10

• To counter the fixation on a rhetoric of victimhood, black folks must engage in a discourse of self-determination.

  Bell Hooks

  Determination, Self, Black

  "Killing Rage: Ending Racism". Book by Bell Hooks, September 15, 1995.

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• Moral capitalism is possible; if not, its strictures are only a kind of misleading vanity, the rhetoric of a secular piety.

  Stephen Young

  Vanity, Moral, Kind

  Stephen Young (2003). “Moral Capitalism: Reconciling Private Interest with the Public Good”, p.9, Berrett-Koehler Publishers

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• In the unexamined American Dream rhetoric promoting mass higher education in the nation of my youth, the implicit vision was that one day everyone, or at least practically everyone, would be a manager or a professional. We would use the most elitist of all means, scholarship, toward the most egalitarian of ends. We would all become chiefs; hardly anyone would be left a mere Indian.

  William A. Henry III

  Dream, Mean, Vision

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• For a decade Americans have been steeped in the rhetoric of "zero tolerance" and the faith that virtually all problems from drug addiction to lousy teaching can be solved by pouring on the punishment. Even without a Commander in Chief who pledges to rid the world of evildoers, smoke them out of their holes and the like, we would be vulnerable to the temptation to brush aside frustrating complexities and relieve intolerable fear (at least for the moment) by settling on one or more scapegoats to crush. To imagine that trauma casts out fantasy is a dangerous mistake.

  Ellen Willis

  Crush, Zero, Mistake

  "Dreaming of War". "The Nation", October 15, 2001.

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• Dialectic, which is the parent of logic, came itself from rhetoric. Rhetoric is in turn the child of the myths and poetry of ancient Greece. That is so historically, and that is so by any application of common sense. The poetry and myths are the response of a prehistoric people to the Universe around them made on the basis of Quality. It is Quality, not dialectic, which is the generator of everything we know.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Children, People, Common Sense

  "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

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• Our office corner has really become an area where the Tea party movement congregates and the rhetoric is really heated. Not just the calls but the e-mails, the slurs.

  Gabrielle Giffords

  Party, Office, Tea

  "'Politics in Arizona Have Become Fueled by Hate…Driven by Anger': Rep. Raúl Grijalva on Shooting of Giffords". "Daily Show", www.democracynow.org. January 10, 2011.

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• It is true that a great deal of the rhetoric of the new atheism is often just the confessional rote of materialist fundamentalism (which, like all fundamentalisms, imagines that in fact it represents the side of reason and truth); but it is also true that the new atheism has sprung up in a garden of contending fundamentalisms.

  David Bentley

  Garden, Sprung Up, Atheism

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• If we become a people who are willing to give up our money and our freedom in exchange for rhetoric and promises, then nothing can save us.

  Thomas Sowell

  Giving Up, People, Promise

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• As a social and as a personal force, religion has become a dependent variable. It does not originate; it reacts. It does not denounce; it adapts. It does not set forth new models of conduct and sensibility; it imitates. Its rhetoric is without deep appeal; the worship it organizes is without piety. It has become less a revitalization of the spirit in permanent tension with the world than a respectable distraction from the sourness of life.

  C. Wright Mills

  Atheism, World, Variables

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• I have known writers who paid no damned attention whatever to the rules of grammar and rhetoric and somehow made the language behave for them.

  Red Smith

  Attention, Language, Made

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• The language of the heart--the language which "comes from the heart" and "goes to the heart"--is always simple, always graceful, and always full of power, but no art of rhetoric can teach it. It is at once the easiest and most difficult language--difficult, since it needs a heart to speak it; easy, because its periods though rounded and full of harmony, are still unstudied.

  Christian Nestell Bovee

  Art, Simple, Needs

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• The press is the foe of rhetoric, but the friend of reason.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Reason, Foe, Presses

  Charles Caleb Colton (1836). “Lacon: Or, Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”, p.420

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• It has been said in praise of some men, that they could take whole hours together upon anything; but it must be owned to the honor of the other sex that there are many among them who can talk whole hours together upon nothing. I have known a woman branch out into a long extempore dissertation on the edging of a petticoat, and chide her servant for breaking a china cup, in all the figures of rhetoric.

  Joseph Addison

  Sex, Men, Talking

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• 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

  Men, Roots, Tree

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• eternity is a depth which no geometry can measure, no arithmetic calculate, no imagination conceive, no rhetoric describe.

  Hannah More

  Imagination, Depth, Eternity

  Hannah More (1840). “Miscellaneous Works: Tragedies. Miscellaneous poems. Hymns and ballads. Sacred Dramas. Coelebs. Practical piety. Moriana”, p.593

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• 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

  Children, Kids, Needs

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• As in 1925, creationists are not battling for religion. They have been disowned by leading church men of all persuasions, for they debase religion even more than they misconstrue science. They are a motley collection to be sure, but their core of practical support lies with the evangelical right, and creationism is a mere stalking horse or subsidiary issue in a political program...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'.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Horse, Lying, Men

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• Assuredly it would be a pity if laughter should ever become, like rhetoric and the arts, a habit.

  Alice Meynell

  Art, Laughter, Would Be

  Alice Meynell (1925). “Essays”

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• we have not been impressed with any attribute of the Senate other than its appearance and manners. We have heard the best speakers: they all fire off speeches which deal with the entire subject in general terms and which do not attempt to debate, to answer opponents' arguments or offer new points for discussion. And the speeches are constantly degenerating into empty rhetoric; they abound in quotations from well-known authors or from their own former speeches.

  Beatrice Webb

  Fire, Answers, Speech

  Beatrice Potter Webb (1963). “American diary, 1898”

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• we have let rhetoric do the job of poetry.

  Cherrie Moraga

  Jobs, Poetry

  Cherríe Moraga (1983). “Loving in the war years: lo que nunca pasó por sus labios”, South End Pr

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• I am the first to admit that I am no great orator or no person that got where I have gotten by any William Jennings Bryan technique.

  Gerald R. Ford

  Technique, Firsts, Persons

  Time Magazine Interview, February 2, 1976.

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• The age-long history of thinking on gravitation, too, was erased from the collective consciousness, and that force somehow became the serendipitous child of Newton's genius. The new attitude is well illustrated by the anecdote of the apple, a legend spread by Voltaire, one of the most active and vehement erasers of the past. ... The need to build the myth of an ex nihilo creation of modern science gave rise to much impassioned rhetoric.

  Lucio Russo

  Children, Attitude, Past

  "The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn". Book by Lucio Russo, 2004.

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• I think the process of being hopeful, being really opportunity oriented, not just in rhetoric but in action, showing that no one get's left behind, not just by talking about it but by doing it, I think is really a key [to political success].

  John Kasich

  Opportunity, Thinking, Keys

  "Kasich Takes the Stage". Interview with Zeke J. Miller, time.com. November 11, 2014.

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• Scientists are used to debating with one another about the finer points of new research. But increasingly, they find themselves battling their televisions and computer screens, which transmit ever-more-heated rhetoric from politicians, pundits, and other public figures who misinterpret, misrepresent, and malign scientific results.

  Lewis M. Branscomb

  Research, Television, Computer

  "Science and Democracy" by Lewis M. Branscomb and Andrew A. Rosenberg, The Scientist, www.the-scientist.com. October 1, 2012.

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• When we have broken our god of tradition, and ceased from our god of rhetoric, then may God fire the heart with His presence.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  God, Heart, Fire

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2008). “The Spiritual Emerson: Essential Works by Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.65, Penguin

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