Top 134 Rhetorical Quotes & Sayings

The second most important attribute of winners, after understanding the human dimension, is knowing what questions to ask, the rhetorical nature.

President Reagan is a rhetorical roundheels, as befits a politician seeking empathy with his audience.

There are occasions when the simplest and fewest words surpass in effect all the wealth of rhetorical amplification.

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.

The revival in religion will be a rhetorical problem - new persuasive words for defaced or degraded ones.

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.

By way of personal instinct, I have an inherent distaste for grandiose rhetorical statements, which don't have any substantive dimension to them

African-Americans have rarely been the beneficiaries of Presidential rhetorical excess.

The reality distortion field was a confounding mélange of a charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will, and eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand.

My speaking style was criticised by no less an authority than Arnold Schwarzenegger. It was a low moment, my friends, to have my rhetorical skills denounced by a monosyllabic Austrian cyborg.

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?

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

Obama's rhetorical overtures to democracy, it turned out, were just a decoy to conceal his unwavering determination to govern from the far left.

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.

Quotations have always been supremely effective rhetorical devices, instruments of one-upmanship, ways of supporting any position under the sun with borrowed or stolen authority.

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

We tend to associate humor with lightheartedness, but really, it's a rhetorical mode than can be applied to any subject. It was through researching Chechnya that I came to understand this.

To claim "humanitarian motives" when the motive is envy and its supposed appeasement, is a favorite rhetorical device of politicians today, and has been for at least a hundred and fifty years.

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

Analogies, in particular, can illuminate, but they can also obscure and confuse. They need to be handled carefully, like rhetorical high explosives.

Art has always been this--pure interrogation, rhetorical question less the rhetoric--whatever else it may have been obliged by social reality to appear.

Bill Knott's poems are . . . rhetorical fluff . . . and fake.

When will all the rhetorical questions end?

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

The documentary style is an incredibly flexible and useful one. It's a wonderful tool for establishing the credibility of the version of things that's in the photograph - a kind of rhetorical device or rhetorical strategy. It's always felt very natural to me, because I want a person to end up thinking about the world, and to think about it in a way that is transformed by the experience of art.

When you see all that rhetorical smoke billowing up from the Democrats, well ladies and gentleman, I'd follow the example of their nominee; don't inhale.

Hypotyposis is the rhetorical effect by which words succeed in rendering a visual scene.

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

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?

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

Postmodernism - and is that term used much any more? - is simply a reiteration of the sophistic or the rhetorical worldview.

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.

Zombies are a great rhetorical prop to talk about people and paranoia, and they are a good vehicle for my misanthropy.

O love-why can't you leave me alone? Which is a rhetorical question meaning: for heaven's sake, don't.

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.

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.

The niftiest turn of phrase, the most elegant flight of rhetorical fancy, isn't worth beans next to a clear thought clearly expressed.

I've been around so long, I can remember when it was a rhetorical question to ask, "Is the pope Catholic?" Now it's a legit question.

We all romp about, grieving, wondering, but with rare exception we mostly remain suspended in the Rhetorical Colloidal Forever that agglutinates between Might and Do.

There was the noise itself, which he thought of vaguely as the noise of classical music, sameish and rhetorical, full of feelings people surely never had

Sometimes societies become too stupid to survive. A nation that takes Barack Obama's current rhetorical flourishes seriously is certainly well advanced along that dismal path.

The idea that we are the gods now, and we are doing things that our ancestors think are god-like is not a rhetorical question. You know what I mean? We really are as gods.

Do I know what rhetorical means?

All rhetorical questions are accusations.

All language is rhetorical, and even the senses are poets.

The Hamas organization is explicitly dedicated to the destruction of Israel. That is not a rhetorical gimmick; it is its declared unwavering primary goal.

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 like to use research to enlarge the poem. And sometimes a rhetorical or syntactical gesture stitches the poem along.

Do the rhetorical quarrels of bourgeois political parties have anything to do with the interests of the humble and downtrodden?

Parla Come Mangi' --It is a common way to say 'be simple', 'don't try to be rhetorical' literaly: 'speak the way you eat

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

We find rhetorical situations everywhere in life, and only our imaginations can get us out of them.

...associational ad hominem attacks remain the left's favorite rhetorical strategy for undermining opponents.

Religious speech is extreme, emotional, and motivational. It is anti-literal, relying on metaphor, allusion, and other rhetorical devices, and it assumes knowledge within a community of believers.

In any piece of rhetorical discourse, one rhetorical term overcomes another rhetorical term only by being nearer to the term which stands ultimate. There is some ground for calling a rhetorical education necessarily aristocratic education in that the rhetorician has to deal with an aristocracy of notions.

I think that when you reveal things that are going to cause pain, you have rhetorical resources in poetry.

So I want to ask you a hypothetical question. My favorite kind. Next to rhetorical ones. I can nap equally well through either kind.

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

Can I ask you a personal question"? Of all the rhetorical questions in the world, that is the one which irritates me most with its simultaneous gesture towards and denial of the trespass that is about to follow.