#rhetoric

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

The design of Rhetoric is to remove those Prejudices that lie in the way of Truth, to Reduce the Passions to the Government of Reasons; to place our Subject in a Right Light, and excite our Hearers to a due consideration of it. ↗

— Mary Astell

#design #due #excite #government #hearers

Democrats were simply hoping to win some political points by getting their outlandish rhetoric published in the newspapers and heard on the talk shows. ↗

— John Doolittle

#getting #heard #hoping #newspapers #outlandish

The royal family's existence is a constant reminder of the hollowness of John Major's rhetoric, and idiotic statements by its leading members a constant boost to the republican cause. They're fine opening hospitals. It's when they open their mouths they get into trouble. ↗

— Alastair Campbell

#cause #constant #existence #family #fine

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

The policies on the Republican side have been much better for Hispanics, for minorities, but the rhetoric, unfortunately, has not. ↗

— Mario Diaz-Balart

#better #hispanics #minorities #much #policies

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. ↗

— William Butler Yeats

#others #ourselves #out #poetry #quarrel

...anyone still attempting to argue that Ebonics is a problem for black students or that it is somehow connected to a lack of intelligence or lack of desire to achieve is about as useful as a Betamax video cassette player, and it's time for those folks to be retired, be they teachers, administrators, or community leaders, so the rest of us can try to do some real work in the service of equal access for black students and all students. (15) ↗

— Adam J. Banks

#black #composition #digitalization #dj #education

I hate the rhetoric of politicians, but I love it when writers lie to me. If novelists ran for office, I would vote for their characters. ↗

— Benson Bruno

#humor #politics #rhetoric #writing #funny