rhetoric

Tell someone to do something, and you change their life__or a day; tell someone a story and you change their life.

Lyndon Johnson__ sentences were the sentences of a man with a remarkable gift for words, not long words but evocative, of a man with a remarkable gift for images, homey images of a vividness that infused the sentences with drama.

He was a stylist, not a thinker. He spent time trying to say things in as complicated a way as possible.

Jefferson could strike up the band even when he was being lazy or fearful.

he knew, unlike most reporters, how to use pauses and the absence of words as effectively as the words themselves.

He did what good lawyers always do. He shifted his argument in the direction his audience was already going.

How Horrid" has a slightly facetious tone that strikes me as Wildean. It appears to embrace the actual horror--puberty, public disgrace--then at the last second nimbly sidesteps it, laughing.

Can I by justice or by crooked ways of deceit ascend a loftier tower which may he a fortress to me all my days? For what men say is that, if I am really just and am not also thought just profit there is none, but the pain and loss on the other hand are unmistakable. But if, though unjust, I acquire the reputation of justice, a heavenly life is promised to me. Since then, as philosophers prove, appearance tyrannizes over truth and is lord of happiness, to appearance I must devote myself.

At the beginning of a pestilence and when it ends, there's always a propensity for rhetoric. In the first case, habits have not yet been lost; in the second, they're returning. It is in the thick of a calamity that one gets hardened to the truth - in other words, to silence.

Sometime rhetoric was just another way to lie and impress persons, and he knew this

He wouldn't hear of anybody's paying taxes, though he was very patriotic.

Language has an ideological agenda that is apt to be hidden from view.