#rhetoric

Unfortunately, President Obama's failed policies of new regulations, higher taxes, and Obamacare and his anti-business rhetoric have hit Hispanics especially hard. Big government really hurts those who are trying to make it. ↗

— Marco Rubio

#big government #especially #failed #failed policies #government

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

#against #application #argument #being #conclusions

If my mother's intention in whole or in part was to ensure that I never had to suffer any indignity or embarrassment for being a Jew, then she succeeded well enough. And in any case there were enough intermarriages and 'conversions' on both sides of her line to make me one of those many mischling hybrids who are to be found distributed all over the known world. And, as someone who doesn't really believe that the human species is subdivided by 'race,' let alone that a nation or nationality can be defined by its religion, why should I not let the whole question slide away from me? Why—and then I'll stop asking rhetorical questions—did I at some point resolve that, in whatever tone of voice I was asked 'Are you a Jew?' I would never hear myself deny it? ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#intermarriage #jews #mothers #nationality #race

Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric. ↗

— Thomas Sowell

#blood #cheap #cost #freedom #much

He steps on stage and draws the sword of rhetoric, and when he is through, someone is lying wounded and thousands of others are either angry or consoled. ↗

— Pete Hamill

#draws #either #lying #others #rhetoric

We've advanced in the construction of a true free-trade area across South America... What's needed now is less rhetoric and more action. ↗

— Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva

#action #advanced #america #area #construction

He (Larry Summers) can frame arguments with such force and conviction that people think he knows more than he does. ↗

— Ron Suskind

#impressions #rhetoric #education

As a result of his experiments he concluded that imitation was a real evil that had to be broken before real rhetoric teaching could begin. This imitation seemed to be an external compulsion. Little children didn’t have it. It seemed to come later on, possibly as a result of school itself. That sounded right, and the more he thought about it the more right it sounded. Schools teach you to imitate. If you don’t imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade. Here, in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating, but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A’s. Originality on the other hand could get you anything – from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it. ↗

— Robert M. Pirsig

#grades #imitation #learning #rhetoric #school

It is not empty rhetoric to talk of the Free World. ↗

— Barbara Amiel

#free #free world #rhetoric #talk #world

I spent my first two years at a small all-male college in Virginia called Hampden-Sydney. That was like going to college 120 years ago. The languages, a year of rhetoric, all of the great books, Western Man courses, stuff like that. ↗

— Stephen Colbert

#books #called #college #courses #first