Rhetorical Impact Quotes

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.

Silence can be a very powerful tool. Sometimes it's more powerful to leave you with nothing.

I've asked every grammar schoolteacher in the nation to have their students write on the meaning of the Statue of Liberty. Wouldn't it be wonderful if the winning kid got up to the microphone and, in front of the world, had to dig into a pocket to pull out a crumpled sheet of paper containing the words that would move us all?

Hitler showed the evil that could be done by the art of rhetoric. Churchill showed how it could help to save humanity.

An effective speaker knows that the success or failure of his talk is not for him to decide - it will be decided in the minds and hearts of his hearers.

There are occasions when the simplest and fewest words surpass in effect all the wealth of rhetorical amplification.

The manner of your speaking is full as important as the matter, as more people have ears to be tickled than understandings to judge.

To preach more than half an hour, a man should be an angel himself or have angels for hearers.

Isn't it funny the way some combinations of words can give you--almost apart from their meaning--a thrill like music?

A change of style is a change of meaning.

Few speeches which have produced an electrical effect on an audience can bear the colorless photography of a printed record.

So in writing, there is always a right word, and every other than that is wrong. There is no beauty in words except in their collocation. The effect of a fanciful word misplaced, is like that of a horn of exquisite polish growing on a human head.

Rhetoric is useful because the true and the just are naturally superior to their opposites, so that, if decisions are improperly made, they must owe their defeat to their own advocates; which is reprehensible. Further, in dealing with certain persons, even if we possessed the most accurate scientific knowledge, we should not find it easy to persuade them by the employment of such knowledge. For scientific discourse is concerned with instruction, but in the case of such persons instruction is impossible.

When I was 12 years old, my pastor came to the church: Dr. Fredrick Samson. And that was revolutionary because he mentored me and I got a chance to see up close the impact of a rhetorical genius.

A raised eyebrow, an inflection of the voice, a caustic remark dropped in the middle of a broadcast can raise doubts in a million minds about the veracity of a public official or the wisdom of a governmental policy.

The difference between Hitler's speeches and Churchill's speeches was that Hitler made you think he could do anything; Churchill made you think you could do anything.