Gunter Grass Quotes

The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.

Demagogues are so easy to identify. They gesture a lot and speak with pulpit rhythms, using words that ring of religious fervour and god-fearing sincerity. Sincerity with nothing behind it takes so much practice. The practice can always be detected. Repetition. Great attempts to keep your attention on words.

rhetoric is will doing the work of imagination.

Similes prove nothing, but yet greatly lighten and relieve the tedium of argument.

I'm manipulating the audience. I'm making sure people sympathize.

Pathos and poignancy are, to me, tactics and techniques; in my work as a writer, I fetch them from my toolbox and use them as required.

Eloquence is a painting of the thoughts.

All writing is a form of manipulation, of course, but you realize that a plain sentence can actually do so much.

Words are cheap. The biggest thing you can say is 'elephant'.

I must say I'm not very fond of oratory that's so full of energy it hasn't any room for facts.

If you track something like a political campaign and parcel out what's being communicated in a literal and narrative sense, and what's being communicated by means of emotional and symbolic language, you might find that it's the latter elements that absolutely dominate and move people. It makes me want to take that language and expose it.

In true demagogic fashion, Trump bypassed the head and spoke directly to the gut, to the biles and bubbling acids of raw emotion.

If you look at the copies of Churchill's speeches that have survived, they are heavily marked up. He was scrupulous about the impact of each word. He preferred short words and the repetition of short words. He knew everything about the techniques of rhetoric.

The way a story makes an argument is quite different from the way a persuasive essay does it. Emotional truth and the logic of metaphors dominate.

In 'Biwi No 1,' I made you laugh. In 'Sirf Tum,' I made you cry. In 'Bas Itna Sa Khwaab Hai,' I am going to make you dream.

Metaphors convince at once or not at all.

Words can do wonderful things. They pound, purr. They can urge, they can wheedle, whip, whine. They can sing, sass, singe. They can churn, check, channelize. They can be a "Hup two three four." They can forge a fiery army of a hundred languid men.

Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the minds weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style.

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.

When an objection cannot be made formidable, there is some policy in trying to make it frightful; and to substitute the yell and the war-whoop, in the place of reason, argument and good order.

There is a truth and beauty in rhetoric; but it oftener serves ill turns than good ones.

Hitler had this understanding that you speak to people's deepest, darkest emotions and give them voice that can be incredibly effective.

It's easy to respond to the hate cries, usually carefully wrapped up in a flag. Perhaps hate is the greatest simplifier of them all. It's the man with the throb in his voice, the man with the easy formula, the man who tries to shout to my emotions instead of speaking to my mind, the man who is sure he is right that I run from like hell.

There is nothing in the world like a persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus and upset the convictions and debauch the emotions of an audience not practiced in the tricks and delusions of oratory

Pretty conceptions, fine metaphors, glittering expressions, and something of a neat cast of verse are properly the dress, gems, or loose ornaments of poetry.