Rhetoric Quotes - Page 5

• Well, I don't know whether it caused anguish in China, but it was not a wise way to proceed. But one has to remember that it was the first experience. And in a Republican administration, there is a conservative wing that looks at China as the last embodiment of communism, which therefore tends towards a more bellicose rhetoric anyway than I would. It's not the dominant element, but every once in a while they get a crack at public statement.

  Henry A. Kissinger

  Wise, Wings, Cracks

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• While sticks and stones break bones, words can never hurt? Manifestly untrue. Politics everywhere are holistic, interconnected, and the rhetoric of right or left can produce toxic atmospheres in which lunacy thrives.

  Phillip Adams

  Leadership, Hurt, Atmosphere

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• There comes a time when what is needed is not just rhetoric, but boots on the ground.

  Baldwin Spencer

  Boots, There Comes A Time, Needed

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• Throughout history, even the harshest and most shameful measures are regularly accompanied by professions of noble intent - and rhetoric about bestowing freedom and independence.

  Noam Chomsky

  Independence, Noble, Profession

  Noam Chomsky (2007). “Interventions”, p.65, City Lights Publishers

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• Literary gentlemen, editors, and critics think that they know how to write, because they have studied grammar and rhetoric; but they are egregiously mistaken. The art of composition is as simple as the discharge of a bullet from a rifle, and its masterpieces imply an infinitely greater force behind them.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Art, Writing, Simple

  Henry David Thoreau (2012). “The Portable Thoreau”, p.389, Penguin

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• More scientific language and less diplomatic rhetoric may make this world even better.

  Wen Jiabao

  World, May, Language

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• A profusion of fancies and quotations is out of place in a love-letter. True feeling is always direct, and never deviates into by-ways to cull flowers of rhetoric.

  Christian Nestell Bovee

  Flower, Feelings, Letters

  Christian Nestell Bovee (1862). “Intuitions and Summaries of Thought”, p.34

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• Dreams became issues of East versus West. Hopes became political rhetoric. Progress became a search for power and domination. Somewhere the truth was lost that people don't make war, governments do.

  Ronald Reagan

  Dream, War, Government

  United States. President (1981-1989 : Reagan), Ronald Reagan (1983). “Ronald Reagan”

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• The ability to name poetry's gestures and rhetorics isn't required to write or read them, any more than a painter needs to know the physics of color to bring forward a landscape. The eye and hand and ear know what they need to know. Some of us want to know more, because knowing pleases.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Writing, Eye, Hands

  "Of Amplitude There Is No Scraping Bottom: An Interview with Jane Hirshfield". Interview with Rebecca Olson, tinhouse.com. March 16, 2015.

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• High tax rates in the upper income brackets allow politicians to win votes with class warfare rhetoric, painting their opponents as defenders of the rich. Meanwhile, the same politicians can win donations from the rich by creating tax loopholes that can keep the rich from actually paying those higher tax rates - or perhaps any taxes at all. What is worse than class warfare is phony class warfare. Slippery talk about 'fairness' is at the heart of this fraud by politicians seeking to squander more of the nation's resources.

  Thomas Sowell

  Heart, Winning, Class

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• Art has always been this--pure interrogation, rhetorical question less the rhetoric--whatever else it may have been obliged by social reality to appear.

  Samuel Beckett

  Art, Reality, Literature

  Samuel Beckett, Ruby Cohn (1983). “Disjecta: miscellaneous writings and a dramatic fragment”, Riverrun Pr

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• Time in the heart and sequence in the brain--
  
  Such as destroyed Rimbaud and fooled Verlaine.
  And let us then take godhead by the neck--
  And strangle it, and with it, rhetoric.

  Conrad Aiken

  Time, Heart, Brain

  Conrad Aiken (1970). “Collected poems”, Oxford Univ Pr

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• One of the many dreadful aspects of the Kennedy 'legacy' is the now-unbreakable grip of celebrity politics, image-doctoring, stage management, and "torch-passing" rhetoric in general.

  Christopher Hitchens

  History, Torches, Legacy

  Christopher Hitchens (2015). “And Yet...: Essays”, p.244, Simon and Schuster

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• The difference between poetry and rhetoric
  is being
  ready to kill
  yourself
  instead of your children.

  Audre Lorde

  Children, Differences, Poetry

  Audre Lorde (2012). “Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches”, p.106, Crossing Press

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• One sees a trend in our political and legal cultures toward treating religious beliefs as arbitrary and unimportant, a trend supported by a rhetoric that implies that there is something wrong with religious devotion.

  Stephen L. Carter

  Christian, Religious, Political

  Stephen L. Carter (1993). “The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion”, Basic Books

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• This trivializing rhetoric runs the subtle but unmistakable message: pray if you like, worship if you must, but whatever you do, do not on any account take your religion seriously.

  Stephen L. Carter

  Christian, Running, Religious

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• Israel deserves America's friendship in reality - not just in rhetoric.

  Eric Cantor

  Reality, Israel, America

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• The prostitute is the scapegoat for everyone's sins, and few people care whether she is justly treated or not. Good people have spent thousands of pounds in efforts to reform her, poets have written about her, essayists and orators have made her the subject of some of their most striking rhetoric; perhaps no class of people has been so much abused, and alternatively sentimentalized over as prostitutes have been but one thing they have never yet had, and that is simple legal justice.

  Alison Roberta Noble Neilans

  Simple, Class, Justice

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• In every conflict, some rhetoric and posturing, so we should take that aside. When facts is that everybody is exhausted and that no one believes that there is a military solution to this. The solution must be a political one.

  Staffan de Mistura

  Military, Believe, Political

  Source: www.npr.org

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• I just find Bobby Kennedy's short campaign for president so inspiring because his rhetoric identified what America can be like if we care about each other.

  Tim Ryan

  America, President, Campaigns

  "Inspiring a Mindful Nation". Interview with Elisha Goldstein, Ph.D., www.huffingtonpost.com. May 29, 2012.

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• Rick Perry is the perfect candidate for those who thought George W. Bush was just too dang cerebral. And Adios, Mofo is the perfect guide to his record, his rhetoric and his remarkable hair. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll vote.

  Paul Begala

  Hair, Perfect, Laughing

  "MSNBC Live Brings On 'Adios Mofo' Author to Slam Rick Perry". www.newsbusters.org. June 5, 2015.

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• Today violence is the rhetoric of the period.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

  Today, Violence, Periods

  Jose Ortega Y Gasset (1960). “the Revolt of the Masses”

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• but I had also learned that freedom of speech means freedom from rhetoric.

  Umberto Eco

  Mean, Freedom Of Speech, Speech

  Umberto Eco (2002). “Five Moral Pieces”, p.80, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I think people are dazzled by Obama's rhetoric, and that people ought to begin to understand that Obama is going to be a mediocre president — which means, in our time, a dangerous president — unless there is some national movement to push him in a better direction.

  Howard Zinn

  Mean, Thinking, People

  "Author, activist Howard Zinn dies", www.hollywoodreporter.com. January 27, 2010.

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• "If you paid me for work," continued Max, whose rhetoric was more sophisticated than you might expect from a man with food in his beard, "I wouldn't have to feel worthless. There's not law says old people have to feel worthless all the while, you know. You paid me, I'd have some dignity." Now it was Mile's turn to nod and smile agreeably. "I think the dignity ship set sail a long time ago, Dad."

  Richard Russo

  Dad, Men, Thinking

  "Empire Falls". Book by Richard Russo, May 8, 2001.

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