Rhetoric Quotes

Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel. It is to bring another out of his bad sense into your good sense.

When you have no basis for an argument, abuse the plaintiff.

Saying is one thing and doing is another.

Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something.

A good speech should be like a woman's skirt: long enough to cover the subject and short enough to create interest.

I can prove anything by statistics except the truth.

I know that one is able to win people far more by the spoken that by the written word, and that every great movement on this globe owes its rise to the great speakers and not to the great writers.

Public education is the great equalizer of America.

I use emotion for the many and reserve reason for the few.

Diplomacy is the art of telling people to go to hell in such a way that they ask for directions.

Men should stop treating feminists like ladies, and instead treat them like the men they say they want to be.

Of old, the demagogue was also a general, and then democracies changed into tyrannies. Most of the ancient tyrants were originally demagogues. They are not so now, but they were then; and the reason is that they were generals and not orators, for oratory had not yet come into fashion.

We all resort to the ad hominem from time to time: in human affairs, it is difficult to avoid it, and probably not desirable. After all, our opponents are human. The proper use of an ad hominem argument, however, still requires evidence to back it up.

When I say 'Crush your enemy', I don't literally mean it.

With words we govern men.

Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts And eloquence.

How long do politicians have to keep on promising heaven and delivering hell before people catch on and stop getting swept away by rhetoric?

A truth does not become greater through repetition.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

As it is the characteristic of great wits to say much in few words, so small wits seem to have the gift of speaking much and saying nothing.

Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

War always begins with the dehumanizing of the enemy through rhetoric

To speak and to speak well, are two things. A fool may talk, but a wise man speaks.

I have never knowingly made a non-controversial speech in my life.

Each side had its uninformed fanatics. And each side had political leaders who fanned the flames with their rhetoric.