Rhetorical Quotes - Page 5

• We find rhetorical situations everywhere in life, and only our imaginations can get us out of them.

  Northrop Frye

  Imagination, Situation

  Northrop Frye (1964). “The Educated Imagination”, p.136, Indiana University Press

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• In an extensive reading of recent books by psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, and inspirationalists, I have discovered that they all suffer from one or more of these expression-complexes: italicizing, capitalizing, exclamation-pointing, multiple-interrogating, and itemizing. These are all forms of what the psychos themselves would call, if they faced their condition frankly, Rhetorical-Over-Compensation.

  James Thurber

  Reading, Book, Expression

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• Quotations have always been supremely effective rhetorical devices, instruments of one-upmanship, ways of supporting any position under the sun with borrowed or stolen authority.

  Justin Kaplan

  Way, Sun, Authority

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• Evolution as described by Charles Darwin is an scientific theory, abundantly reconfirmed, explaining physical phenomena by physical causes. Intelligent Design is a faith-based initiative in rhetorical argument. Should we teach I.D. in America's public schools? Yes, let's do - not as science, but alongside other spiritual beliefs, such as Islam, Zoroastrianism and the Hindu Idea that Earth rests on Chukwa, the giant turtle.

  David Quammen

  Spiritual, School, Intelligent

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• The niftiest turn of phrase, the most elegant flight of rhetorical fancy, isn't worth beans next to a clear thought clearly expressed.

  Jeff Greenfield

  Phrases, Fancy, Next

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• The flag of the United States has not been created by rhetorical sentences in declarations of independence and in bills of rights. It has been created by the experience of a great people, and nothing is written upon it that has not been written by their life. It is the embodiment, not of a sentiment, but of a history.

  Woodrow Wilson

  Rights, People, Independence

  Woodrow Wilson, Albert Bushnell Hart (2002). “Selected Addresses and Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson”, p.91, The Minerva Group, Inc.

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• Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour an serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honoured within socialist-feminism.

  Donna J. Haraway

  Rhetorical Strategies, Play, Political

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• Genuine dialogue, not rhetorical bomb-throwing, leads to progress.

  Mark Udall

  Progress, Bombs, Genuine

  "Same-sex marriage debate: A model for other issues" by Mark Udall, www.politico.com.

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