282 Quotes About Rhetoric

.. a simile is not a lie, unless it is a bad simile.

HANNAH: Don't let Bernard get to you. It's only performance art, you know. Rhetoric, they used to teach it in ancient times, like PT. It's not about being right, they had philosophy for that. Rhetoric was their chat show. Bernard's indignation is a sort of aerobics for when he gets on television.

Republicans know well that a change of rhetorical pace is necessary. But efforts by their leaders to damp down the bellicosity of newly elected Tea Party types is running into the fact that the Tea Partiers have only the high volume setting on their amplifiers, just like Palin. They're like a couple having a fight at a funeral; politely sotto voce, then suddenly bursting out fortissimo with their plaints and accusations.

He was one of those many-faced politicians without any strong beliefs, with no great resources, no backbone and no real knowledge of anything, a country lawyer with provincial good looks, craftily walking the tight-rope between any extremist parties, a kind of republican Jesuit, a sort of dubious little mushroom such as flourish in their hundreds on the popular dunghill of universal suffrage.

It has been said that we should ‘give thought to our ways.’ But in the bombarding rhetoric born of our troubled times, maybe the first thing that we should do is give thought to whether ‘our ways’ are actually our ways.

If you will take any means necessary to achieve a goal it is not a just one any longer.

But that is the danger of metaphors: they can be overstretched, innocently or intentionally, as an attempt at polemic or rhetorical advantage.

The Conscience is a thousand witnesses.

This was always the case when people asked if you knew what something meant. They didn’t want you to know it. They wanted to be able to explain it themselves, to prove themselves bearers of esoteric knowledge.