Rhetoric Quotes

Out of our quarrels with others we make rhetoric. Out of our quarrels with ourselves we make poetry. (William Butler Yeats)
When a child, my dreams rode on your wishes, I was your son, high on your horse, My mind a top whipped by the lashes Of your rhetoric, windy of course. View quote
Stephen Spender
Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric. View quote
Thomas Sowell
Progressive rhetoric has the effect of concealing social crisis and moral breakdown by presenting them as the birth pangs of a new order. View quote
Christopher Lasch
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. View quote
Christopher Lasch
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. View quote
Mel Brooks
Vision is not political rhetoric. View quote
Jean Chrétien
I have never allowed anti-Russian rhetoric in Ukrainian policy toward such a strategic partner like Russia. This is the first point. I never went against the interests of the Ukrainian state and the Ukrainian people. View quote
Viktor Yanukovych
The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy. View quote
Susan Sontag
The surrealist thinks he has outstripped the whole of literary history when he has written (here a word that there is no need to write) where others have written "jasmines, swans and fauns." But what he has really done has been simply to bring to light another form of rhetoric which hitherto lay hidden in the latrines. View quote
José Ortega y Gasset
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)
If you get beyond the political rhetoric [and assembled a group to solve Social Security] it would take them 15 minutes. It would take them 15 minutes only because 10 minutes was used for pleasantries. View quote
Alan Greenspan
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. View quote
Gabrielle Giffords
Men have sacrificed and crippled themselves physically and emotionally to feed, house, and protect women and children. None of their pain or achievement is registered in feminist rhetoric, which portrays men as oppressive and callous exploiters. View quote
Camille Paglia
There is no gay leader anywhere near the stature of Martin Luther King, because black activism drew on the profound spiritual tradition of the church, to which gay political rhetoric is childishly hostile. View quote
Camille Paglia
Ambitious young women today are taught to ignore or suppress every natural instinct, if it conflicts with the feminist agenda posed on them. All literary and artistic works, no matter how great, that document the ambivalence of female sexuality they are trained to dismiss as "misogynous.” In other words, their minds are being programmed to secede from their bodies ... there is a huge gap between feminist rhetoric and women's actual sex lives, where feminism is of little help except with a certain stratum of deferential, malleable, white middle-class men. View quote
Camille Paglia
To counter the fixation on a rhetoric of victimhood, black folks must engage in a discourse of self-determination. View quote
Bell hooks
No one complains of the rules of Grammar as fettering Language; because it is understood that correct use is not founded on Grammar, but Grammar on correct use. A just system of Logic or of Rhetoric is analogous, in this respect, to Grammar.. View quote
Richard Whately
Of Rhetoric various definitions have been given by different writers; who, however, seem not so much to have disagreed in their conceptions of the nature of the same thing, as to have had different things in view while they employed the same term. View quote
Richard Whately
Concerning the utility of Rhetoric, it is to be observed that it divides itself into two; first, whether Oratorical skill be, on the whole, a public benefit, or evil; and secondly, whether any artificial system of Rules is conducive to the attainment of that skill. View quote
Richard Whately
Histories make men wise poets, witty the mathematics, subtle natural philosophy, deep morals, grave logic And rhetoric, able to contend. (Francis Bacon)
Like a rough orator, that brings more truth Than rhetoric, to make good his accusation. View quote
Philip Massinger
It is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other. View quote
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The purpose of formulating [a] conflict as a game is not that of resolving the conflict by 'solving the game.' It is that of displaying the structure of the conflict and thereby exposing features of it that may be concealed by rhetoric. In particular, appreciation of the peculiar structure of some of the so-called mixed-motive conflicts represented nonzero-sum games may change the conflicting parties' perception of their situation. View quote
Anatol Rapoport
There is a limit to the success of conservative populism and the exploitation of "little guy" or "silent majority" rhetoric, and it is very often reached because of the emaciated, corrupted personalities of the demagogues themselves. View quote
Christopher Hitchens