#rhetoric

Our government has made a number of promises to the men and women who served in our nation's armed forces. Sadly, these promises of health care, education and other benefits have existed more in rhetoric than in reality. ↗

— Allen Boyd

#armed forces #benefits #care #education #existed

President Bush has consistently used rhetoric, and that is not convincing given his past record. ↗

— Grace Napolitano

#consistently #convincing #given #his #past

Just as the soul animates the body, so, in a way, meaning breathes life into a word. ↗

— John of Salisbury

#rhetoric #art

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

Well," a female voice said. "What have we here?" "Here," Bethany said, responding to the woman's rhetorical question, "we have a teenager. And she's pissed. ↗

— Jennifer Lynn Barnes

#rhetorical #teen #teen

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

(William) Seward would inspire a cow with statesmanship if she understood our language. ↗

— Henry Adams

#leadership #rhetoric #inspirational

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

RHETORIC The art of making life less believable; the calculated use of language, not to alarm but to do full harm to our busy minds and properly dispose our listeners to a pain they have never dreamed of. The context of what can be known establishes that love and indifference are forms of language, but the wise addition of punctuation allows us to believe that there are other harms - the dash gives the reader the clear signal they are coming. ↗

— Ben Marcus

#art

I have a little theory that I'd like to air here, if I may. What is it that you think makes you magicians?" More silence. Fogg was well into rhetorical-question territory now anyway. He spoke more softly. "Is it because you are intelligent? Is it because you are brave and good? Is is because you're special? Maybe. Who knows. But I'll tell you something: I think you're magicians because you're unhappy. A magician is strong because he feels pain. He feels the difference between what the world is and what he would make of it. Or what did you think that stuff in your chest was? A magician is strong because he hurts more than others. His wound is his strength. Most people carry that pain around inside them their whole lives, until they kill the pain by other means, or until it kills them. But you, my friends, you found another way: a way to use the pain. To burn it as fuel, for light and warmth. You have learned to break the world that has tried to break you. ↗

— Lev Grossman

#bravery #fuel #intelligence #light #magic