282 Quotes About Rhetoric

Arguments for slavery weren't pragmatic or ethical discussions about the realities of slavery; they were assertions about abstract identities (The Slave, The Slave Owner, The Abolitionist) and performances of loyalty to the South. They were demagoguery.

Partisans will try to appeal to the notion that political arguments are really about which group is better in order to dismiss criticism of their group. We might think that we can refute criticism by pointing out that 'the other party does the same thing too.' But whether the other party does it too is relevant only if we're arguing about which party is better, not which policies are better.

When someone blamed Hecataeus the sophist because that, being invited to the public table, he had not spoken one word all supper-time, Archidamidas answered in his vindication 'He who knows how to speak, knows also when'.

A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up the details...

Rationality is undetected rhetoric.

Rhetoric makes use of nature’s secrets in the same way as painters who try to imitate it: their most beautiful work is false.

Revolutionaries need poets, too.

Člověk by nikdy neměl v rozhovoru s dětmi bezstarostně používat všední, banální způsob vyjadřování.

For that is to be my purpose here, you see, to teach rhetoric to you children: I, who was never a teacher but who liked to converse with my friends and seek out the nature of things.”“They have their own imagination of who you are, but you are not that,” Kebes said.“Now that’s true,” Sokrates said. “And perhaps what I shall teach is not what they expect me to teach.