rhetoric

Power is the most persuasive rhetoric.

President Obama is a gifted politician. He is gifted with rhetoric virtuosity. He is gifted with the ability to lie directly to camera without blinking. And he is gifted with some of the most incompetent conservative opposition in the history of the country.

The rhetoric is the key to the character. It's the verbal music of the piece.

Every president to hold office has espoused some version of Americanism - the truths that we hold self-evident, even when those truths are not always in evidence. But for all their grand rhetoric and mostly good deeds, none was able to seal the deal on the trifecta of equality, plurality and socioeconomic ascendancy. Obama has.

When liberals finally grasped the strength of popular feeling about the family, they cried to appropriate the rhetoric and symbolism of family values for their own purposes.

Roosevelt's declaration that Americans had 'nothing to fear but fear itself' was a glorious piece of inspirational rhetoric and just as gloriously wrong.

Rhetoric is the art of ruling the minds of men.

History never repeats itself, historians do.

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

If rhetoric study was the military, grammar teachers would be the drill sergeants.

From her character in the HBO miniseries: "The art of politics is the art of applying the seat of the britches to the seat of the chair.

the matter is as it is in all other cases: if it is naturally in you to be a good orator, a notable orator you will be when you have acquired knowledge and practice ...

When you depart from standard usage, it should be deliberate and not an accidental lapse. Like a poet who breaks the rules of poetry for creative effect, this only works when you know and respect the rule you are breaking. If you have never heard of the rules you are breaking, you have no right to do so, and you are likely to come off like a buffoon or a barbarian. Breaking rules, using slang and archaic language can be effective, but it is just as likely to give you an audience busy with wincing.

In science, the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs.

The weaker the argument the louder and more frequent the rhetoric.

[It is not] the poet's business to use verse as an advanced form of rhetoric, nor to give to political statements the aura of eternal truth.

It is this simplicity that makes the uneducated more effective than the educated when addressing popular audiences__akes them, as the poets tell us, 'charm the crowd's ears more finely.' Educated men lay down broad general principles; uneducated men argue from common knowledge and draw obvious conclusions.

True eloquence is irresistible. It charms by its images of beauty, it enforces an argument by its vehement simplicity. Orators whose speeches are "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," only prevail where truth is not understood, for knowledge and simplicity are the foundation of all true eloquence. Eloquence abounds in beautiful and natural images, sublime but simple conceptions, in passionate but plain words. Burning words appeal to the emotions as well as to the intellect; they stir the soul and touch the heart.