#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

Rhetoric is the art of ruling the minds of men. ↗

— Plato

#men #minds #rhetoric #ruling

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. ↗

— Boris Johnson

#arnold schwarzenegger #austrian #authority #criticised #denounced

When we walk away from global warming, Kyoto, when we are irresponsibly slow in moving toward AIDS in Africa, when we don't advance and live up to our own rhetoric and standards, we set a terrible message of duplicity and hypocrisy. ↗

— John F. Kerry

#africa #aids #away #duplicity #global

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

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

— Brent Scowcroft

#changes #far #his #mainly #nature

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

The broad masses of a population are more amenable to the appeal of rhetoric than to any other force. ↗

— Adolf Hitler

#any #appeal #broad #force #masses