Top 33 Rhetorical Quotes

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.

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?

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.

People ask me why my figures have to be so black. There are a lot of reasons. First, the blackness is a rhetorical device. When we talk about ourselves as a people and as a culture, we talk about black history, black culture, black music. That’s the rhetorical position we occupy.

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?

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.

President Obama is asking critics of the Iran nuclear deal what the alternative is other than war as if it’s rhetorical question, but there is an answer: a better deal.

I’ve been writing long enough to know that fiction, as a rhetorical mode, works very differently from expository writing. If an author has a specific critique about contemporary society in mind, fiction tends not to be the best means to deliver that critique.

Abstract anger is great for rhetorical carrying on. You can go on endlessly about the post office, but it doesn’t mean you’re mad at your mailman.

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.

For inspiration, we still demand the rhetorical high notes. Clinton has hit them before, in her speech in Beijing as first lady when she said, ‘Women’s rights are human rights,’ and in her 2008 concession speech, when she talked about the ’18 million cracks’ in the glass ceiling.

Our words, actions, and diplomatic efforts should be aimed at trying to achieve pragmatic goals rather than creating rhetorical effect.

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.

Think Apple, think the FBI. We are living ‘Atlas Shrugged.’ Why is it so important? Because I would hate for the country to have that rhetorical question: Where is John Galt, who is John Galt? John Galt is all of us.

Genuine dialogue, not rhetorical bomb-throwing, leads to progress.

There’s something about rhetorical violence that is ugly and worrying.

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?

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.

Like ‘God’s Not Dead,’ the fundamentalist Christian movie that has become a popular hit, ‘Transcendence’ is essentially a dramatized debate. And as ‘God’s Not Dead’ stacks the rhetorical cards for the Deity’s existence, the Pfister film eventually hangs back with the Luddites.

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.

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?

Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.

I come from a place that likes grandeur; it likes large gestures. It is not inhibited by flourish. It is a rhetorical society. It is a society of physical performance. It is a society of style.

To many Americans, saying the United States will never be socialist is rhetorical: Of course it won’t – we have a Constitution that forbids it.

So far the changes in the president in his second term have been mainly of a rhetorical nature.

The problems seem so easy out there on the stump. Deficits shrink with a rhetorical flourish.

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.

I think of a monument as being symbolic and for the people and therefore rhetorical, not honest, not personal.

Donald Trump promises to impose, soon after his inauguration, a new requirement on federal agencies: If they want to issue a new regulation, they have to rescind two regulations that are now on the books. The idea of ‘one in, two out’ has rhetorical appeal, but it’s going to be extremely hard to pull off.

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.

It’s known as the Livingstone Formulation. It’s a cunning rhetorical device routinely deployed to shield avowedly left-wing establishment figures from any scrutiny that might expose their ‘anti-Zionist’ obsessions as redolent of a bigotry of that older and more unambiguously unsanitary type: antisemitism.

I don’t want to become a rhetorical speaker. My effectiveness is mastering all of the data and being able to respond.

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.