After ages of bombast, the rhetoric of virtue has become ironic and shy.
The walking of passers-by offers a series of turns and detours that can be compared to "turns of phrase" or "stylistic figures. " There is a rhetoric of walking. The art of "turning" phrases finds an equivalent in an art of composing a path.
Rhetoric is a poor substitute for action.
Power is the most persuasive rhetoric.
The songs worked as a different kind of rhetoric, one that could reach the fence-sitters.
We spend so much time bantering about the words when the real open conversations might very well be our actions. I worry about our rhetoric.
Rhetoric is not important. Actions are.
Rhetoric never won a revolution yet.
After Iraq, there's been Libya, there's Syria, and the rhetoric of, you know, democracy versus radical Islam. When you look at the countries that were attacked, none of them were Wahhabi Islamic fundamentalist countries. Those ones are supported, financed by the U. S. , so there is a real collusion between radical Islam and capitalism. What is going on is really a different kind of battle.
but I had also learned that freedom of speech means freedom from rhetoric.
Rhetoric in serious discourses is like the flowers in corn; pleasing to those who come only for amusement, but prejudicial to him who would reap profit from it.
The crowning insult [of abortion] is that this ordeal is represented to her as some kind of a privilege. Her sad and onerous duty is garbed in the rhetoric of a civil right.
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.
Rhetoric and dialectics can't change what I have learned from observation and experience.
Like so many before him who have ruined countries around the world, Obama has a greatly inflated idea of his own capabilities and the capabilities off what can be accomplished by rhetoric or even by political power.
What we all want is public safety. We don't want rhetoric that's framed through ideology.
There comes a time when what is needed is not just rhetoric, but boots on the ground.
There is a limit to the success of conservative populism and the exploitation of "little guy" or "silent majority" rhetoric, and it is very often reached because of the emaciated, corrupted personalities of the demagogues themselves.
I am a plain man, and I care and know comparatively little about rhetoric.
eternity is a depth which no geometry can measure, no arithmetic calculate, no imagination conceive, no rhetoric describe.