#rhetoric

How Horrid" has a slightly facetious tone that strikes me as Wildean. It appears to embrace the actual horror--puberty, public disgrace--then at the last second nimbly sidesteps it, laughing. ↗

— Alison Bechdel

#perspective #rhetoric #home

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 people you see in Nigeria today have always lived as neighbors in the same space for as long as we can remember. So it's a matter of settling down, lowering the rhetoric, the level of hostility in the rhetoric is too high. ↗

— Chinua Achebe

#down #high #hostility #level #lived

We need to think more about the nature of rhetoric in anthropology. There isn't a body of knowledge and thought to fall back on in this regard. ↗

— Clifford Geertz

#anthropology #back #body #fall #knowledge

The American people demand results, not rhetoric, especially when it comes to national security issues. ↗

— J. D. Hayworth

#american people #comes #demand #especially #issues

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 just find Bobby Kennedy's short campaign for president so inspiring because his rhetoric identified what America can be like if we care about each other. ↗

— Tim Ryan

#america #because #bobby #campaign #care

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

#arms race #beat #been #country #down

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

— Hugh Sidey

#easy #flourish #out #problems #rhetorical

There comes a time when what is needed is not just rhetoric, but boots on the ground. ↗

— Baldwin Spencer

#comes #ground #just #needed #rhetoric