282 Quotes About Rhetoric

Lincoln learned to summon the passions, but he never addressed his audience as sweethearts.

Analogy and probability are not bedrock; they are lifeboats in an ocean of doubt, and sometimes they founder. So rhetoric tends to the passionate:we argue, not with surety, but as the shipwrecked clinging to the only thing they have.

The Montgomery bus boycott would have happened without King, but King's oratory helped to ensure that the boycott came one of those exceptional local movements for justice that would send ripples of inspiration to oppressed people everywhere.

He was a stylist, not a thinker. He spent time trying to say things in as complicated a way as possible.

He could be as memorable an orator as his father, particularly when he was speaking on that topic that had captured his imagination;

he knew, unlike most reporters, how to use pauses and the absence of words as effectively as the words themselves.

Lyndon Johnson’s sentences were the sentences of a man with a remarkable gift for words, not long words but evocative, of a man with a remarkable gift for images, homey images of a vividness that infused the sentences with drama.

Must, never, must avoid, must guard: the minatory commands came the eleven times (from the departing Eisenhower). In contrast, Kennedy's rhetoric on January 20 with a cascade of permissions: the word "let" rang out 14 times.

Rhetoric is what shapes history, if not truth.