Rhetoric Quotes - Page 13

• Since we want not emancipation from impulse but clarification of impulse, the duty of rhetoric is to bring together action and understanding into a whole that is greater than scientific perception.

  Richard M. Weaver

  Understanding, Perception, Together

  Richard M. Weaver (1985). “The Ethics of Rhetoric”, p.24, Psychology Press

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• I definitely don't agree with that sort of rhetoric from the United States - this idea that all the major conflicts of our age need to be solved militarily.

  Bernard-Henri Levy

  Ideas, Age, United States

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• Most human things are full of conflict and ambivalence, not ease and simplicity. The world has grown increasingly fundamentalist, and the parameters of discussion have become narrowed. People, when they're fearful, are vulnerable to certainty in rhetoric.

  Dana Spiotta

  People, Simplicity, Ease

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• I came from the time of so-called New Criticism - the poem in itself, the writing in itself - but around that time I had come across a critic called Kenneth Burke, who wrote a book called A Rhetoric of Motives, and it seemed to talk about another way, and gradually I realized that other way was that the reader made a difference.

  Vito Acconci

  Book, Writing, Differences

  Interview with Shelley Jackson, believermag.com. January 1, 2007.

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• 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

  School, Important, Trying

  Interview with Shelley Jackson, believermag.com. January 1, 2007.

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• Throughout the twentieth century and into the beginning of the twenty-first, the United States repeatedly used its military power, and that of its clandestine services, to overthrow governments that refused to protect American interests. Each time, it cloaked its intervention in the rhetoric of national security and liberation. In most cases, however, it acted mainly for economic reasons-specifically to establish, promote and defend the right of Americans to do business around the world without interference.

  Stephen Kinzer

  Military, Government, World

  Stephen Kinzer (2007). “Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq”, p.3, Macmillan

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• I am learning by the week, but my poesy is still not my own. New rhyme, new me me me in words. I am not all this carven rhetoric.

  Allen Ginsberg

  New Me, Week, Rhyme

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• I think Robert F. Kennedy really, finally, cared; he realized that all of the rhetoric had to be put down into some form of action. That's perhaps the reason they killed him. They don't care what you say, you can say as much as you want to, provided you don't do anything. If you start to do something and your shuffling raises too much dust, they will disestablish you. That's what happened to Martin Luther King.

  Marlon Brando

  Kings, Thinking, Dust

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• Enjoy your dear wit and gay rhetoric, That hath so well been taught her dazzling fence.

  John Milton

  Gay, Taught, Fence

  John Milton (2007). “Complete Shorter Poems”, p.220, Pearson Education

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• Environmentalism needs to be absolutely based in objective and verifiable science, it needs to be rational, and it needs to be flexible. And it needs to be apolitical. To mix environmental concerns with the frantic fantasies that people have about one political party or another is to miss the cold truth - that there is very little difference between the parties, except a difference in pandering rhetoric.

  Michael Crichton

  Party, Differences, People

  Remarks to the Commonwealth Club, San Francisco, www.cs.cmu.edu. September 15, 2003.

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• The songs worked as a different kind of rhetoric, one that could reach the fence-sitters.

  Peter Yarrow

  Song, Different, Kind

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• The business and design of the Royal Society is: To improve the knowledge of naturall things, and all useful Arts, Manufactures, Mechanic practices, Engines and Inventions by Experiments-(not meddling with Divinity, Metaphysics, Moralls, Politicks, Grammar, Rhetoric or Logick).

  Robert Hooke

  Art, Practice, Design

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• We have to be the people who stand up and say look, vigilance is good and prudence is good. But a kind of irrational fear that leads itself to demagogic rhetoric is something that we have to say no - no, we're not going to go there.

  Russell D. Moore

  People, Looks, Irrational Fear

  "Round-Table On Refugees: How People Of Faith Are Navigating The Crisis". "All Things Considered" with Michel Martin, www.npr.org. November 21, 2015.

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• Numbers serve to discipline rhetoric. Without them it is too easy to follow flights of fancy, to ignore the world as it is and to remold it nearer the heart's desire.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Heart, Numbers, Discipline

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• Obama's failure to close Guantanamo is yet another instance where the rhetoric of democratic and constitutional rights proved not useful for his international relations, relations which are always pursued in ways that continue to link and fortify securitarian power with the opening of new markets.

  Judith Butler

  Rights, Links, Way

  "Weapon of the Strong: Conversations on US State Terrorism". Book by Jon Bailes and Cihan Aksan, November 27, 2012.

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• Like so many before him who have ruined countries around the world, Obama has a greatly inflated idea of his own capabilities and the capabilities off what can be accomplished by rhetoric or even by political power.

  Thomas Sowell

  Country, Ideas, Political

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• 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

  Government, Media, Practice

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• Study after study, not only here but in other countries, show that the most affordable housing is where there has been the least government interference with the market - contrary to rhetoric.

  Thomas Sowell

  Country, Government, Affordable Housing

  Thomas Sowell (2011). “Dismantling America and Other Controversial Essays (Large Print 16pt)”, p.30, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• Nothing more guarantees the erosion of character than getting something for nothing. In the liberal welfare state, one develops an entitlement mentality. And the rhetoric of liberalism - labeling each new entitlement a 'right reinforces this sense of entitlement.' -

  Dennis Prager

  Character, Erosion, Guarantees

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• Having spent years ruining the housing markets with their interference, leading to a housing meltdown that has taken the whole economy down with it, politicians have now moved on into micro-managing automobile companies and medical care. They are not going to stop unless they get stopped. And that is not going to happen until the voters recognize the fact that political rhetoric is no substitute for competence.

  Thomas Sowell

  Taken, Years, Political

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• 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

  Government, Numbers, Political

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• Contrary to the rhetoric emanating from the American left, the 'rich' are currently paying a lot more than 'their fair share.' It is only a handful of mega-rich, those whose entire incomes are derived from dividends and capital gains, rather than salaries or business profits, who have the ability to pay lower tax rates than some members of the middle class. The left knows this but continues to build their 'freeloading millionaire' straw man because it makes good politics.

  Peter Schiff

  Men, Class, Salary

  "There's A Hidden 9 In Herman Cain's 9-9-9 Plan". www.businessinsider.com. October 18, 2011.

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• Remarkably, [Sen. Dianne] Feinstein was reading her statement. So her mare's-nest of inapposite words and unclear thoughts cannot be excused as symptoms of Biden's Disease, that form of logorrhea that causes victims, such as Sen. Joe Biden, to become lost on the syntactical back roads of their extemporaneous rhetoric.

  George Will

  Reading, Biden, Disease

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• Most of the people in the upper income brackets are not rich and do not have wealth sheltered offshore. They are typically working people who have finally reached their peak earning years after many years of far more modest incomes-and now see much of what they have worked for siphoned off by politicians, to the accompaniment of lofty rhetoric.

  Thomas Sowell

  Years, People, Earning

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• Beneath all the rhetoric about relevance lies a profoundly disturbing possibility - that people may base their lives upon an illusion, upon a blatant lie. The attractiveness of a belief is all too often inversely proportional to its truth... To allow "relevance" to be given greater weight than truth is a mark of intellectual shallowness and moral irresponsibility.

  Alister E. McGrath

  Lying, People, Intellectual

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