rhetorical tactics Quotes

If you can't answer a man's arguments, all is not lost; you can still call him vile names.

It really does seem that the Democrat's problem isn't that they're calling for timetables - it's that they're calling them 'timetables'. You're up against Bush and the Republicans - you've got to bring some zing. Don't call them timetables - call them 'Patriot Dates', 'Freedom Deadlines'... 'Glory Goals'.

English is the perfect language for preachers because it allows you to talk until you think of what to say.

Nothing drives your opponents more crazy than being utterly reasonable. And nothing makes demonizing or delegitimizing your opponents easier than letting them shriek unreasonable things for you. The Republicans need to get back to being the party that elicits unreasonable shrieking from their opponents. Not the other way around.

The Catholic clergy seldom bother to make their arguments plausible; it is plain that they have little respect for human intelligence, and indeed little belief in its existence.

This is not a man who sees America like you and I see America. Our opponent is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their own country. Americans need to know this.

Instead of engaging on the merits and saying, "Well, we want an open border, you know, we really do," and that's all good for America because they know the people will reject that, they [the elites] attack Donald Trump as an extremist, which I think is unfair.

In a debate, rather pull to pieces the argument of thy antagonists than offer him any of thy own; for thus thou wilt fight him in his own country.

Orators are most vehement when they have the weakest cause, as men get on horseback when they cannot walk.

Unfortunately, public debates do not have much room for subtlety. The audience wants a quick thrust at your opponent, not a slow and convoluted series of moves. Whenever Obama uses subtleties in discussing a complex issue, he gets creamed.

In the United States Senate, one of the things I observed in the early days - and it's still used - and that is that you take someone's argument and then you misrepresent it and misstate and disagree with it. And it's very effective. I've done it myself a number of times. But eventually, eventually people catch on.

Our politicians don't say anything anymore: they just refute and assert.

When an objection cannot be made formidable, there is some policy in trying to make it frightful; and to substitute the yell and the war-whoop, in the place of reason, argument and good order.

I think people actually notice sometimes the content of what one is saying rather than the decibel level at which he says it. And a lot of times when people don't have a lot to say, they increase the volume.

They may attack me with an army of six hundred syllogisms; and if I do not recant, they will proclaim me a heretic.

The fact is that, once you are the person - and Ms.[Hillary] Clinton is the person who injected this type of commentary [bigot] into this race [2016] - once you inject that type of commentary into this race, you can't then sit back and start complaining about it or have some of your handmaidens in the media complain about it.

I mean,[Marco] Rubio, he's having fun. I've got to say I've never seen him enjoy himself out there so much. He's found way to get under his skin. So, he's found way to look like he's somebody that is a force, which has hasn't so far.

Trump is a room-reader. He'll slow down a line, rephrase a point, work in a pause, and ride the energy of his audience wherever it takes him.

It is my custom to keep on talking until I get the audience cowed.

Obama's rhetorical overtures to democracy, it turned out, were just a decoy to conceal his unwavering determination to govern from the far left.

I had become too accustomed to the pseudo-Left new style, whereby if your opponent thought he had identified your lowest possible motive, he was quite certain that he had isolated the only real one. This vulgar method, which is now the norm and the standard in much non-Left journalism as well, is designed to have the effect of making any noisy moron into a master analyst.

Listening to liberals invoke the sanctity of "science" to promote their crackpot ideas creates the same uneasy feeling as listening to Bill Clinton cite Scripture.

Always win fools first. They talk much, and what they have once uttered they will stick to; whereas there is always time, up to the last moment, to bring before a wise man arguments that may entirely change his opinion.