Rhetoric Sayings and Quotes

Below you will find our collection of inspirational, wise, and humorous old rhetoric quotes, rhetoric sayings, and rhetoric proverbs, collected over the years from a variety of sources.

Rhetoric is rooted in an essential function of language itself, a function that is wholly realistic and continually born anew: the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols. Kenneth Burke
You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself. Lionel Shriver
The child who has felt a strong love for his surroundings and for all living creatures, who has discovered joy and enthusiasm in work, gives us reason to hope that humanity can develop in a new direction. Maria Montessori
If you stand on a soapbox and trade rhetoric with a dictator you never win. Mel Brooks
Rhetoric and dialectics can't change what I have learned from observation and experience. Paul Getty
Thus rhetoric, it seems, is a producer of persuasion for belief, not for instruction in the matter of right and wrong . And so the rhetorician's business is not to instruct a law court or a public meeting in matters of right and wrong, but only to make them believe. Plato
Rhetoric, which is the use of language to inform or persuade, is very important in shaping public opinion. We are very easily fooled by language and how it is used by others. Ray Comfort
I don't get myself caught up in the rhetoric of any personal comments that are made. Roger Goodell
Art has always been this pure interrogation, rhetorical question less the rhetoric whatever else it may have been obliged by social reality to appear. Samuel Beckett
But I had also learned that freedom of speech means freedom from rhetoric. Umberto Eco