Quotes about Rhetoric

My judgment is that as long as the pastors of the church are embarrassed by this urgent language to God and assume in our Enlightenment model that such rhetoric has no actual force, we will not get very far in the struggle for justice.

It is only a poem, and we might say rightly that singing a song does not change reality. However, we must not say that with too much conviction. The evocation of an alternative reality consists at least in part in the battle for language and the legitimization of a new rhetoric. The language of the empire is surely the language of managed reality, of production and schedule and market. But that language will never permit or cause freedom because there is no newness in it. Doxology

One hidden act of kindness is worth more than all the burial mounds of rhetoric, all the mumbling and fumbling and tardiness of Christians so preoccupied with cultivating their prayer lives that they cannot hear the anguished cry of the child in the barrio.

The whole of the Trivium was, in fact, intended to teach the pupil the proper use of the tools of learning.

The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan.

When I go hear a man speak, I like to hear him speak like he's fighting a swarm of bees.

Give a wise man an honest brief to plead and his eloquence is no remarkable achievement.

A man who is furnished with arguments from the mint will convince his antagonist much sooner than one who draws them from reason and philosophy.

I bless the gods for not letting my education in rhetoric, poetry, and other literary studies come easily to me, and thereby sparing me from an absorbing interest in these subjects.

Be a politician; no training necessary.

I guess truth can hurt you worse in an election than about anything that can happen to you.

Politics is applesauce.