Rhetorical Analysis Quotes

[Critiquing the Gettysburg Address:] We did not conceive it possible that even Mr. Lincoln would produce a paper so slipshod, so loose-joined, so puerile, not alone in literary construction, but in its ideas, its sentiments, its grasp.

Rhetoric is the counterpart of logic; since both are conversant with subjects of such a nature as it is the business of all to have a certain knowledge of, and which belong to no distinct science. Wherefore all men in some way participate of both; since all, to a certain extent, attempt, as well to sift, as to maintain an argument; as well to defend themselves, as to impeach.

Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.

The pedant and the priest have always been the most expert of logicians - and the most diligent disseminators of nonsense and worse.

I'm an essayist. And this is a genre that has existed for a few thousand years. Ever heard of Cicero? So these rules that I'm working under are not mine but rather were established by writers who recognized the difference between the hard research of journalism and the kind of inquiry of mind that characterizes the essay.

A week after his State of the Union address, political observers are still trying to figure out what President Obama's game is. That's because rhetorically and substantively, he seems to be in another world.

If you were making poetry out of convictions - trying to convince other people - you were in the territory of rhetoric, and that wasn't the territory of poetry. I think that's pretty smart. I think that it doesn't need to be altogether true, but that was my starting place.

Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.

And with a practice of writing comes a certain important integrity. A culture filled with bloggers thinks differently about politics or public affairs, if only because more have been forced through the discipline of showing in writing why A leads to B.

If it were true that conservatives were racist, sexist, homophobic, fascist, stupid, inflexible, angry, and self-righteous, shouldn't their arguments be easy to deconstruct? Someone who is making a point out of anger, ideology, inflexibility, or resentment would presumably construct a flimsy argument. So why can't the argument itself be dismembered rather than the speaker's personal style or hidden motives? Why the evasions?

A definition is the start of an argument, not the end of one.

Meaning is socially, historically, and rhetorically constructed.

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?

It is?classic Bill Clinton, sincere and deceptive at the same time, requiring a careful reading between the lines.

There is a quiet revolution going on in the study of the Bible. At its center is a growing awareness that the Bible is a work of literature and that the methods of literary scholarship are a necessary part of any complete study of the Bible.

We need to think more about the nature of rhetoric in anthropology. There isn't a body of knowledge and thought to fall back on in this regard.

People like me took Donald Trump literally, but never seriously. But his supporters took him seriously and not literally.

The science of style as an organ of thought, of style in relation to the ideas and feelings, might be called the organology of style.

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.