Rhetoric Quotes - page 12
In the second part of the Phaedrus Plato attempts to clarify the nature of "true” rhetoric. ... it does not arise from a posterior unity which presupposes the duality of ratio and passio, but illuminates and influences the passions through its original, imaginative characters. Thus philosophy is not a posterior synthesis of pathos and logos but the original unity of the two under the power of the original archai. Plato sees true rhetoric as psychology which can fulfill its truly "moving” function only if it masters original images [eide]. Thus the true philosophy is rhetoric, and the true rhetoric is philosophy, a philosophy which does not need an "external” rhetoric to convince, and a rhetoric that does not need an "external” content of verity.
Ernesto Grassi
[Rousseau's educational theories had persuaded teachers] to dispense with the structured systems of learning which have been so successful in the past. [The result is] the belief, taught by Mr Roy Jenkins, that a permissive is a civilised society... A facile rhetoric of total liberty and of costless, superficial universal protest has really been a cover for irresponsibility. Our loud talk about the community overlies the fact that we have no community. We talk about neighbourhoods and all too often we have no neighbours. We go on about the home when we only have dwelling places containing television sets. It is the absence of a frame of rules and community, place and belonging, responsibility and neighbourliness that makes it possible for people to be more lonely than in any previous stage in our history. Vast factories, huge schools, sprawling estates, sky-scraping apartment blocks; all these work against our community and our common involvement one with another.
Keith Joseph
Lightning hits!
Quality! Virtue! Dharma! That is what the Sophists were teaching! Not ethical relativism. Not pristine "virtue." But aretê. Excellence. Dharma! Before the Church of Reason. Before substance. Before form. Before mind and matter. Before dialectic itself. Quality had been absolute. Those first teachers of the Western world were teaching Quality, and the medium they had chosen was that of rhetoric.
Robert M. Pirsig
Orthodox churches were stripped of their valuables in 1922 at the instigation of Lenin and Trotsky. In subsequent years, including both the Stalin and the Khrushchev periods, tens of thousands of churches were torn down or desecrated, leaving behind a disfigured wasteland that bore no resemblance to Russia such as it had stood for centuries. Entire districts and cities of half a million inhabitants were left without a single church. Our people were condemned to live in this dark and mute wilderness for decades, groping their way to God and keeping to this course by trial and error. The grip of oppression that we have lived under, and continue to live under, has been so great that religion, instead of leading to a free blossoming of the spirit, has been manifested in asserting the faith on the brink of destruction, or else on the seductive frontiers of Marxist rhetoric, where so many souls have come to grief.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Republican policies must aim at the most destructive trend in the family disintegration: the undermining of parental authority through parental abdication and government usurpation. Notwithstanding Democratic rhetoric to the contrary, it is not uncompassionate and anti-family to mandate parental consent for all decisions made by minors in and out of school, and to refuse government aid to those who reject the traditional values of responsibility and accountability. While no government program can make people be good, policies should reward people when they are, and not subsidize them when they are not. For example, every level of government should statutorily and procedurally prefer married couples over cohabitators, homosexuals and fornicators. The cost of sin should fall on the sinner not the taxpayer. While such thinking may be attacked for lacking political realism in a changing world, it is imperative that government stand firm in support of traditional family values.
Bob McDonnell
Inasmuch as the soul is present, there will be power not confident but agent. To talk of reliance is a poor external way of speaking. Speak rather of that which relies, because it works and is. Who has more obedience than I masters me, though he should not raise his finger. Round him I must revolve by the gravitation of spirits. We fancy it rhetoric, when we speak of eminent virtue. We do not yet see that virtue is Height, and that a man or a company of men, plastic and permeable to principles, by the law of nature must overpower and ride all cities, nations, kings, rich men, poets, who are not.
This is the ultimate fact which we so quickly reach on this, as on every topic, the resolution of all into the ever-blessed ONE. Self-existence is the attribute of the Supreme Cause, and it constitutes the measure of good by the degree in which it enters into all lower forms. All things real are so by so much virtue as they contain.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Due to their parents' straitened circumstances, the youths [Rembrandt and Jan Lievens, living in Leiden, then] were compelled to take teachers whose fees were modest. Were these teachers to be confronted with their pupils today, they would feel just as abashed as those teachers who gave Virgil his first lessons in poetry, Cicero in rhetoric and Archimedes in mathematics. Let it however be said, with due respect for everyone's capacities and without detracting from anyone (for what is it to me?): these two owe nothing to their teachers but everything to their aptitude. Had they never received any tuition but been left to their own devices and suddenly been seized by the urge to paint, I am convinced that they would have risen to the same heights as they indeed have. It would be wrong to think that others have led them to this point.
Rembrandt
It is in this context that the freedom rhetoric must be understood. It is a way of speaking which resonates somewhat and seems to have resonated effectively in the last three years. But it is not what Conservatives want, even if it fits in with what they want. Indeed, it is a way of not saying what they want, a way of attracting sympathy and support for, and attributing principle to, a social structure which they wish to conserve or restore.
Maurice Cowling
As much as people are rightly laying responsibility for much of the philosophy and rhetoric that clearly motivated the El Paso killer at the feet of the president, it's important to remember where Trump gets many of his talking points: Fox News. Anyone who has tuned into their evening lineup over the past couple of years knows that the language in the shooter's online screed could have come from the mouths of any number of the network's stars. But the only one who has been spouting the specific ideological mix that motivated the killer is Tucker Carlson.
Tucker Carlson
Under the Trump administration, aggressive rhetoric against the Venezuelan government has ratcheted up to a more extreme and threatening level, with Trump administration officials talking of "military action” and condemning Venezuela, along with Cuba and Nicaragua, as part of a "troika of tyranny.” Problems resulting from Venezuelan government policy have been worsened by US economic sanctions, illegal under the Organization of American States and the United Nations ― as well as US law and other international treaties and conventions. These sanctions have cut off the means by which the Venezuelan government could escape from its economic recession, while causing a dramatic falloff in oil production and worsening the economic crisis, and causing many people to die because they can't get access to life-saving medicines. Meanwhile, the US and other governments continue to blame the Venezuelan government ― solely ― for the economic damage, even that caused by the US sanctions.
Noam Chomsky
