Margaret Thatcher Quotes

Rhetoric is useful because the true and the just are naturally superior to their opposites, so that, if decisions are improperly made, they must owe their defeat to their own advocates; which is reprehensible. Further, in dealing with certain persons, even if we possessed the most accurate scientific knowledge, we should not find it easy to persuade them by the employment of such knowledge. For scientific discourse is concerned with instruction, but in the case of such persons instruction is impossible.

A good debater is not necessarily an effective vote-getter: you can find a hole in your opponent's argument through which you could drive a coach and four ringing jingle bells all the way, and thrill at the crystallization of a truth wrung out from a bloody dialogue - which, however, may warm only you and your muse, while the smiling paralogist has in the meantime made votes by the tens of thousands.

To pull off successful attacks in debates, you have to execute with nuance and subtlety. It has to be artful.

I wish I could give you a lot of advice, based on my experience of winning political debates. But I don't have that experience. My only experience is at losing them.

In our system leadership is by consent, not command. To lead a President must persuade. Personal contacts and experiences help shape his thinking. They can be critical to his persuasiveness and thus to his leadership.

In every debate, whatever the format, whatever the questions, there is one and only one way to identify the winner: Who commands the room? Who drives the narrative? Who is in charge?

If you have to be persuaded about something, you shouldn't do it.

My agent said, 'Jerry, Dancing With the Stars - they want you on there.' I said, 'Ain't no way. I'm not going to do that.' Then he came back to me again, and he kept putting pressure on me. I said, 'All right, I'll give it a try.'

President Obama seems to think that you win by demonstrating that you're a more reasonable person than your opponents. It didn't work too badly, I'll grant, as an electoral strategy in the 2012 election.

He who frames the question wins the debate.

It is wise to persuade people to do things and make them think it was their own idea.

What is politics but persuading the public to vote for this and support that and endure these for the promises of those.

The job of campaigning is to change minds.

Would you persuade, speak of interest, not of reason.

I sit here all day trying to persuade people to do the things they ought to have the sense to do without my persuading them. That's all the powers of the President amount to.

Microtargeting, as its name implies, is a way to identify small but crucial groups of voters who might be won over to a given side, and which messages would do the trick.

You can't show up at a church every 4 October and say, 'Vote for me,' and call that persuasion.

I'm probably more persuasive than the next person if I want to be, but do I want to be? In my head, I just don't go there.

The caucus is a sort of representative meeting which sits voting and voting till they have cut out all the known men against whom much is to be said, and agreed on some unknown man against whom there is nothing known, and therefore nothing to be alleged.

Suckers try to win arguments, nonsuckers try to win.

If you can make someone laugh who's dead set against you, that's the first step to winning them over to your side.

The two most fundamental strategic choices are deciding where to play and how to win.

If you give Congress a chance to vote on both sides of an issue, it will always do it.

Spin is overrated. It is strategy, not spin, that wins elections.

Nothing in oratory is more important than to win for the orator the favour of his hearer, and to have the latter so affected as to be swayed by something resembling an impulse of the spirit impetu quodam animi or emotion perturbatione, rather than by judgment or deliberation. For men decide far more problems by hate, or love, or lust, or rage, or sorrow, or joy, or hope, or fear, or illusion, or some other inward emotion aliqua permotione mentis, than by reality or authority, or any legal standard, or judicial precedent or statute.