Ted Rall Quotes

Look, I debate for a living so I don't need to learn any lessons from amateurs.

In oratory the will must predominate.

Eloquence, n. The art of orally persuading fools that white is the color that it appears to be. It includes the gift of making any color appear white.

The object of oratory alone is not truth, but persuasion.

Use your logick, and then your rhetorick. Rhetorick without logick, is like a tree with leaves and blossoms, but no root; yet I confess more are taken with rhetorick than logick, because they are catched with a free expression, when they understand not reason. Logick must be natural, or it is worth nothing at all: Your rhetorick figures may be learned.

A good orator is pointed and impassioned.

I'm not good at throwing around rhetoric.

A lot of people ask me, did debating help me as a writer, and I honestly don't know.

I consider myself to be quite persuasive when I want.

No matter what stage of life you are graduating from or entering, learning how to build and state your case is something every person in the world should know how to do.

Oratory is the power of beating down your adversary's arguments and putting better in their place.

He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense.

I preferred the weapons of dialectic to all the other teachings of philosophy, and armed with these, I chose the conflicts of disputation rather than the trophies of war.

Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. This is not a function of any other art.

An orator is the worse person to tell a plain fact.

I enjoyed debate on the floor but it's not really debate in the same way.

The first, that their pretensions to this possession of an art properly so called in their art of speaking are entirely unfounded; and the second, that they are involved in a profound mistake in their confusion of the good with the pleasant.

If only I was as eloquent as Demosthenes, I would have to do no more than repeat a single word three times.

I wasn't a great debater.

Now I see that going out into the testing ground of men it is the tongue and not the deed that wins the day.

A candidate for office can have no greater advantage than muddled syntax; no greater liability than a command of language.

Great speech is impassioned; small speech cantankerous.

I may challenge the whole orations of Demosthenes and Cicero, and of any more eminent orator, if Europe has furnished more eminent, to produce a single passage superior to the speech of Logan

There is nothing in the world like persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus.

As a Shakespeare character, if you can persuade someone in a sentence or a speech, you've got it right.