Rhetoric Quotes - Page 15

• Vision is not political rhetoric.

  Jean Chretien

  Political, Vision, Political Rhetoric

  Jean Chretien (2010). “My Years as Prime Minister”, p.264, Vintage Canada

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• To counter the fixation on a rhetoric of victimhood, black folks must engage in a discourse of self-determination.

  Bell Hooks

  Determination, Self, Black

  "Killing Rage: Ending Racism". Book by Bell Hooks, September 15, 1995.

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• Moral capitalism is possible; if not, its strictures are only a kind of misleading vanity, the rhetoric of a secular piety.

  Stephen Young

  Vanity, Moral, Kind

  Stephen Young (2003). “Moral Capitalism: Reconciling Private Interest with the Public Good”, p.9, Berrett-Koehler Publishers

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• In the unexamined American Dream rhetoric promoting mass higher education in the nation of my youth, the implicit vision was that one day everyone, or at least practically everyone, would be a manager or a professional. We would use the most elitist of all means, scholarship, toward the most egalitarian of ends. We would all become chiefs; hardly anyone would be left a mere Indian.

  William A. Henry III

  Dream, Mean, Vision

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• For a decade Americans have been steeped in the rhetoric of "zero tolerance" and the faith that virtually all problems from drug addiction to lousy teaching can be solved by pouring on the punishment. Even without a Commander in Chief who pledges to rid the world of evildoers, smoke them out of their holes and the like, we would be vulnerable to the temptation to brush aside frustrating complexities and relieve intolerable fear (at least for the moment) by settling on one or more scapegoats to crush. To imagine that trauma casts out fantasy is a dangerous mistake.

  Ellen Willis

  Crush, Zero, Mistake

  "Dreaming of War". "The Nation", October 15, 2001.

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• Dialectic, which is the parent of logic, came itself from rhetoric. Rhetoric is in turn the child of the myths and poetry of ancient Greece. That is so historically, and that is so by any application of common sense. The poetry and myths are the response of a prehistoric people to the Universe around them made on the basis of Quality. It is Quality, not dialectic, which is the generator of everything we know.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Children, People, Common Sense

  "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

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• Our office corner has really become an area where the Tea party movement congregates and the rhetoric is really heated. Not just the calls but the e-mails, the slurs.

  Gabrielle Giffords

  Party, Office, Tea

  "'Politics in Arizona Have Become Fueled by Hate…Driven by Anger': Rep. Raúl Grijalva on Shooting of Giffords". "Daily Show", www.democracynow.org. January 10, 2011.

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• It is true that a great deal of the rhetoric of the new atheism is often just the confessional rote of materialist fundamentalism (which, like all fundamentalisms, imagines that in fact it represents the side of reason and truth); but it is also true that the new atheism has sprung up in a garden of contending fundamentalisms.

  David Bentley

  Garden, Sprung Up, Atheism

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• If we become a people who are willing to give up our money and our freedom in exchange for rhetoric and promises, then nothing can save us.

  Thomas Sowell

  Giving Up, People, Promise

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• As a social and as a personal force, religion has become a dependent variable. It does not originate; it reacts. It does not denounce; it adapts. It does not set forth new models of conduct and sensibility; it imitates. Its rhetoric is without deep appeal; the worship it organizes is without piety. It has become less a revitalization of the spirit in permanent tension with the world than a respectable distraction from the sourness of life.

  C. Wright Mills

  Atheism, World, Variables

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• Children cannot eat rhetoric and they cannot be sheltered by commissions. I don't want to see another commission that studies the needs of kids. We need to help them.

  Marian Wright Edelman

  Children, Kids, Needs

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• eternity is a depth which no geometry can measure, no arithmetic calculate, no imagination conceive, no rhetoric describe.

  Hannah More

  Imagination, Depth, Eternity

  Hannah More (1840). “Miscellaneous Works: Tragedies. Miscellaneous poems. Hymns and ballads. Sacred Dramas. Coelebs. Practical piety. Moriana”, p.593

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• Nothing is text but what is spoken of in the Bible and meant there for person and place; the rest is application; which a discreet man may do well; but it is his scripture, not the Holy Ghost's. First, in your sermons use your logic, and then your rhetoric; rhetoric without logic is like a tree with leaves and blossoms, but no root.

  John Selden

  Men, Roots, Tree

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• It has been said in praise of some men, that they could take whole hours together upon anything; but it must be owned to the honor of the other sex that there are many among them who can talk whole hours together upon nothing. I have known a woman branch out into a long extempore dissertation on the edging of a petticoat, and chide her servant for breaking a china cup, in all the figures of rhetoric.

  Joseph Addison

  Sex, Men, Talking

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• The press is the foe of rhetoric, but the friend of reason.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Reason, Foe, Presses

  Charles Caleb Colton (1836). “Lacon: Or, Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”, p.420

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• The language of the heart--the language which "comes from the heart" and "goes to the heart"--is always simple, always graceful, and always full of power, but no art of rhetoric can teach it. It is at once the easiest and most difficult language--difficult, since it needs a heart to speak it; easy, because its periods though rounded and full of harmony, are still unstudied.

  Christian Nestell Bovee

  Art, Simple, Needs

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• I have known writers who paid no damned attention whatever to the rules of grammar and rhetoric and somehow made the language behave for them.

  Red Smith

  Attention, Language, Made

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• The death penalty is a poor person's issue. Always remember that: after all the rhetoric that goes on in the legislative assemblies, in the end, when the deck is cast out, it is the poor who are selected to die in this country.

  Helen Prejean

  Country, Issues, Goes On

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• Rhetoric and dialectics can't change what I have learned from observation and experience.

  Paul Getty

  I Have Learned, Observation, Can't Change

  "As I See it: The Autobiography of J. Paul Getty". Book by Jean Paul Getty, Getty Publications, p. 106, 2003.

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• Democracy, in the United States rhetoric refers to a system of governance in which elite elements based in the business community control the state by virtue of their dominance of the private society, while the population observes quietly. So understood, democracy is a system of elite decision and public ratification, as in the United States itself. Correspondingly, popular involvement in the formation of public policy is considered a serious threat. It is not a step towards democracy; rather it constitutes a 'crisis of democracy' that must be overcome.

  Noam Chomsky

  Money, Community, Decision

  Noam Chomsky (1990). “On Power and Ideology”, p.6, Black Rose Books Ltd.

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• We really don't have a policy [on climate change]. There's a lot of rhetoric and not a lot of action.

  Mark Udall

  Climate, Action, Global Warming

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• The bombing in Oklahoma City has focused renewed attention on the rhetoric that’s been coming from the right and those who cater to angry white men. Right-wing talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Bob Grant, Oliver North, G. Gordon Liddy, Michael Reagan and others take to the air every day with basically the same format: Detail a problem, blame the government or a group and invite invective from like-minded people. Never do most of the radio hosts encourage outright violence, but the extent to which their attitudes may embolden or encourage some extremists has clearly become an issue.

  Bryant Gumbel

  Attitude, Men, Wings

  "Liberal hypocrisy on display over murder suspect's manifesto". "Hannity", www.foxnews.com. February 8, 2013.

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• We should always measure a government's environmental rhetoric against its environmental record

  John Key

  Government, Environmental, Records

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• A lot of times in the rhetoric, people forget the facts. And the facts are that thousands of small businesses-Hispanically owned or otherwise-pay taxes at the highest marginal rate.

  George W. Bush

  Humor, People, Political

  Remarks by the President to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov. March 19, 2001.

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• Democrats were simply hoping to win some political points by getting their outlandish rhetoric published in the newspapers and heard on the talk shows.

  John Doolittle

  Winning, Political, Newspapers

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