Rhetorical quotes:

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Genuine dialogue, not rhetorical bomb-throwing, leads to progress. -- Mark Udall
Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth. -- George Santayana
We all romp about, grieving, wondering, but with rare exception we mostly remain suspended in the Rhetorical Colloidal Forever that agglutinates between Might and Do. -- Tony Kushner
Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This claim is rhetorical nonsense. -- Stephen Jay Gould
My speaking style was criticised by no less an authority than Arnold Schwarzenegger. It was a low moment, my friends, to have my rhetorical skills denounced by a monosyllabic Austrian cyborg. -- Boris Johnson
It seems to me we have been in a rhetorical arms race in this country, with each side unwilling to lay down its weapons for fear - usually justified - the other side would beat them to a pulp. -- Pat Sajak
All rhetorical questions are accusations. -- David Mamet
Do I know what rhetorical means? -- Homer
When will all the rhetorical questions end? -- George Carlin
Bill Knott's poems are . . . rhetorical fluff . . . and fake. -- Ron Loewinsohn
...associational ad hominem attacks remain the left's favorite rhetorical strategy for undermining opponents. -- Jonah Goldberg
The niftiest turn of phrase, the most elegant flight of rhetorical fancy, isn't worth beans next to a clear thought clearly expressed. -- Jeff Greenfield
By way of personal instinct, I have an inherent distaste for grandiose rhetorical statements, which don't have any substantive dimension to them -- Kevin Rudd
Quotations have always been supremely effective rhetorical devices, instruments of one-upmanship, ways of supporting any position under the sun with borrowed or stolen authority. -- Justin Kaplan
That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact. -- Walter Pater
To claim "humanitarian motives" when the motive is envy and its supposed appeasement, is a favorite rhetorical device of politicians today, and has been for at least a hundred and fifty years. -- Helmut Schoeck
In late modernity we grow more and more accustomed to politicians and public figures who are indebted to their appetites for their "values," to their intellectual sloth for their "principles," to their rhetorical cleverness for their "conscience," and to their regimented conformism for their "philosophy." -- Kenny Smith
What is in the air there in Washington, what is in the water? What is wrong with them? This is not a rhetorical question. I think it is unspoken question No.1 as Americans look at so many of the individuals in our government. What is wrong with them? -- Peggy Noonan
When I hear the president of the United States in a great little rhetorical flourish talk about the leavening hand of the government, everybody knows that leavening hand is attached to the long arm of the Internal Revenue Service. And no one mistakes the Internal Revenue Service with something called liberty. -- Sean Hannity
In an extensive reading of recent books by psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, and inspirationalists, I have discovered that they all suffer from one or more of these expression-complexes: italicizing, capitalizing, exclamation-pointing, multiple-interrogating, and itemizing. These are all forms of what the psychos themselves would call, if they faced their condition frankly, Rhetorical-Over-Compensation. -- James Thurber
Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour an serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honoured within socialist-feminism. -- Donna J. Haraway
The flag of the United States has not been created by rhetorical sentences in declarations of independence and in bills of rights. It has been created by the experience of a great people, and nothing is written upon it that has not been written by their life. It is the embodiment, not of a sentiment, but of a history... -- Woodrow Wilson
I note that warmists are often banging on about the fact that sceptics like Christopher Booker and myself 'only' have arts degrees. But actually that's our strength, not our weakness. Our intellectual training qualifies us better than any scientist - social or natural sciences - for us to understand that this is, au fond, not a scientific debate but a cultural and rhetorical one. -- James Delingpole
There's something about rhetorical violence that is ugly and worrying. -- Mario Cuomo
The problems seem so easy out there on the stump. Deficits shrink with a rhetorical flourish. -- Hugh Sidey
So far the changes in the president in his second term have been mainly of a rhetorical nature. -- Brent Scowcroft
I think of a monument as being symbolic and for the people and therefore rhetorical, not honest, not personal. -- Claes Oldenburg
I don't want to become a rhetorical speaker. My effectiveness is mastering all of the data and being able to respond. -- Norman Finkelstein
The Hamas organization is explicitly dedicated to the destruction of Israel. That is not a rhetorical gimmick; it is its declared unwavering primary goal. -- James Howard Kunstler
The poetry of this one is called philosophical, of that one philological, of a third rhetorical, and so on. Which is then the poetic poetry? -- Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
Using rhetorical questions in speeches is a great way to keep the audience involved. Don't you think those kinds of questions would keep your attention? -- Bo Bennett
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Religious speech is extreme, emotional, and motivational. It is anti-literal, relying on metaphor, allusion, and other rhetorical devices, and it assumes knowledge within a community of believers. -- Amy Waldman
Barack Obama may have found the answer to his biggest rhetorical challenge: When millions of voters are unemployed or underemployed, how does a president simultaneously sound realistic and optimistic? -- Ron Fournier
The intersection of political analysis and Internet theory is a busy crossroad of cliche, where familiar rhetorical vehicles - decentralized authority, emergent leadership, empowered grass roots - create a ceaseless buzz. -- Gary Wolf
Here is a fundamental conflict in educated society: We are not supposed to value beauty so highly, and yet who can defend against its sheer power to move, its rhetorical force? -- Russell Smith
People often ask how I got interested in the brain; my rhetorical answer is: 'How can anyone NOT be interested in it?' Everything you call 'human nature' and consciousness arises from it. -- Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
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If you write a good action sequence well in a novel, you're already writing it for film, because the only way to do it well is to use some of the same tricks. They're rhetorical, not visual, but it's the same move. -- Justin Cronin
Obviously, Jay-Z is one of the greatest entertainers of the world today. Not only is he a remarkable rhetorical genius, he's also a man of deep sympathy and empathy for those who are lost and vulnerable, but especially under-educated youth of all cultures and stripes. -- Michael Eric Dyson
I think fiction isn't so good at being for or against things in general - the rhetorical argument a short story can make is only actualized by the accretion of particular details, and the specificity of these details renders whatever conclusions the story reaches invalid for wider application. -- George Saunders
Now, there are sometimes making a connection between one section and another that sometimes you do want to see the pattern because it helps you to lead into the next thing - it's a rhetorical thing, where you just see how the pattern has to go into the next thing. -- Leo Ornstein
Americans born since World War II have grown up in a media-saturated environment. From childhood, we have developed a sort of advertising literacy, which combines appreciation for technique with skepticism about motives. We respond to ads with at least as much rhetorical intelligence as we apply to any other form of persuasion. -- Virginia Postrel
The only tactic liberals have is to try to intimidate people into thinking that the Tea Party is racist. The Tea Party is not a racist movement, period! If it were, why would the straw polls keep showing that the black guy is winning? That's a rhetorical question. Let me state it: The black guy keeps winning. -- Herman Cain
All language is rhetorical, and even the senses are poets. -- George Santayana
African-Americans have rarely been the beneficiaries of Presidential rhetorical excess. -- Julianne Malveaux
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Hypotyposis is the rhetorical effect by which words succeed in rendering a visual scene. -- Umberto Eco
Natural rights, nonsense; natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense, elevated nonsense, nonsense going on stilts. -- John Stuart Mill
President Reagan is a rhetorical roundheels, as befits a politician seeking empathy with his audience. -- William Safire
O love-why can't you leave me alone? Which is a rhetorical question meaning: for heaven's sake, don't. -- Thomas Merton
We find rhetorical situations everywhere in life, and only our imaginations can get us out of them. -- Northrop Frye
There are occasions when the simplest and fewest words surpass in effect all the wealth of rhetorical amplification. -- George Henry Lewes
The revival in religion will be a rhetorical problem - new persuasive words for defaced or degraded ones. -- Thornton Wilder
I think that when you reveal things that are going to cause pain, you have rhetorical resources in poetry. -- Vijay Seshadri
I like to use research to enlarge the poem. And sometimes a rhetorical or syntactical gesture stitches the poem along. -- Alison Hawthorne Deming
Do the rhetorical quarrels of bourgeois political parties have anything to do with the interests of the humble and downtrodden? -- Mario Vargas Llosa
The second most important attribute of winners, after understanding the human dimension, is knowing what questions to ask, the rhetorical nature. -- Frank Luntz
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
Parla Come Mangi' --It is a common way to say 'be simple', 'don't try to be rhetorical' literaly: 'speak the way you eat -- Elizabeth Gilbert
He wanted to ask whether she were insane, but he had been married long enough to know the price of injudicious rhetorical questions. -- Diana Gabaldon
Obama's rhetorical overtures to democracy, it turned out, were just a decoy to conceal his unwavering determination to govern from the far left. -- Sean Hannity
So I want to ask you a hypothetical question. My favorite kind. Next to rhetorical ones. I can nap equally well through either kind. -- Orson Scott Card
When you see all that rhetorical smoke billowing up from the Democrats, well ladies and gentleman, I'd follow the example of their nominee; don't inhale. -- Ronald Reagan
Sometimes societies become too stupid to survive. A nation that takes Barack Obama's current rhetorical flourishes seriously is certainly well advanced along that dismal path. -- Mark Steyn
I've been around so long, I can remember when it was a rhetorical question to ask, "Is the pope Catholic?" Now it's a legit question. -- Rush Limbaugh
I've been around so long, I can remember when it was a rhetorical question to ask, "Is the pope Catholic?" Now it's a legit question. -- Rush Limbaugh
There was the noise itself, which he thought of vaguely as the noise of classical music, sameish and rhetorical, full of feelings people surely never had -- Alan Hollinghurst
The reality distortion field was a confounding mÃ©lange of a charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will, and eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand, -- Walter Isaacson
The open letter has always been an interesting rhetorical strategy - a way of delivering a pointed message to a specific individual or group while also reaching a wide audience. -- Roxane Gay
We tend to associate humor with lightheartedness, but really, it's a rhetorical mode than can be applied to any subject. It was through researching Chechnya that I came to understand this. -- Anthony Marra
Godwin's law states that the longer any online debate goes on, the likelier it is that someone will play the Nazi card. It's the rhetorical equivalent of going nuclear and stupid at the same time. -- John Avlon
I grew up in a little Methodist church that was very rural, very community support-oriented, made up of great people who talked about love and grace and the spiritual experience, but only in rhetorical terms. -- James Redfield
Can I ask you a personal question"? Of all the rhetorical questionsin the world, that is the one which irritates me most with itssimultaneous gesture towards and denial of the trespass that is aboutto follow. -- Kamila Shamsie

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