37 Quotes Tagged: rhetoric

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.

[Responding to the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce's question whether he traced his descent from an ape on his mother's or his father's side]

A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would rather be a man — a man of restless and versatile intellect — who … plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice.

For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible

"Ce n'est pas la première fois que je remarque combien, en France particulièrement, les mots ont plus d’empire que les idées."

("It's not the first time I've noticed how much more power words have than ideas, particularly in France.")

Destructive criticism is always easy because, despite some campaign oratory, some of us are not yet perfect.

Seward would inspire a cow with statesmanship if she understood our language.

Even hackneyed and commonplace maxims are to be used, if they suit one's purpose: just because they are commonplace, every one seems to agree with them, and therefore they are taken for truth.

One horse-laugh is worth ten-thousand syllogisms.

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

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

Avoid the enthymeme form when you are trying to rouse feeling; for it will either kill the feeling or will itself fall flat: all simultaneous motions tend to cancel each other either completely or partially.

Richard Weaver in his book, "Ethics of Rhetoric" calls a "god-term": a charismatic expression drained dry of any objective significance, but remaining an empty symbol intended to win unthinking applause

I think you are wrong, Basil, but I won't argue with you. It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.

I discovered that night (in his college's student politics) that an audience has a feel to it, and, in the parlance of the theater, that audience and I were together.

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.