More rhetoric...

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."-- Dwight David Eisenhower, 1961

"Treaties, you see, are like girls and roses; they last while they last."-- Charles de Gaulle

The idea that a congressman would be tainted by accepting money from private industry or private sources is essentially a socialist argument."-- Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA)

"Capital punishment is our society's recognition of the sanctity of human life."-- Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT)

"Our dreams must be stronger than our memories. We must be pulled by our dreams, rather than pushed by our memories."-- Jesse Jackson

"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country."
-- Thomas Jefferson

"You've got to work things out in the cloakroom, and when you've got them worked out, you can debate a little before you vote."-- Lyndon Baines Johnson

"The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were."
-- John Fitzgerald Kennedy

"The Republican nominee-to-be, of course, is also a young man. But his approach is as old as McKinley. His party is the party of the past. His speeches are generalities from Poor Richard's Almanac. Their platform, made up of left-over Democratic planks, has the courage of our old convictions. Their pledge is a pledge to the status quo--and today there can be no status quo."
-- John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 1960

"Democracy is no easy form of government. Few nations have been able to sustain it. For it requires that we take the chances of freedom; that the liberating play of reason be brought to bear on events filled with passion; that dissent be allowed to make its appeal for acceptance; that men chance error in their search for the truth."-- Robert F. Kennedy

"What is objectionable, what is dangerous about extremists, is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents."-- Robert F. Kennedy

"Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movements and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us." --- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

"The law may not be able to make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me."
-- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
"I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality .... I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word."
-- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

"With public sentiment, nothing can fail. Without it, nothing can succeed."-- Abraham Lincoln

"Politics would be a helluva good business if it weren't for the goddamned people."--Richard M. Nixon

"I am not the problem. I am a Republican."-- J. Danforth Quayle, Republican Vice-President

"A tree is a tree. How many more do you have to look at?"-- Ronald Reagan, 1966 (opposing expansion of Redwood National Park

"The United Sates has much to offer the third world war.--- Ronald Reagan (speaking on what the US has to offer the Third World. He repeated this error nine times in the same speech.)

"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it comes strong than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism -- ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power."
-- Franklin Delano Roosevelt

"I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. All I care to know is that a man is a human being, and that is enough for me; he can't be any worse."--- Mark Twain

"They attack the one man with their hate and their shower of weapons. But he is like some rock which stretches into the vast sea and which, exposed to the fury of the winds and beaten against by the waves, endures all the violence."--- Virgil

“A politics that is not sensitive to the concerns and circumstances of people's lives, a politics that does not speak to and include people, is an intellectually arrogant politics that deserves to fail.” ---Paul Wellstone

“The future will not belong to those who sit on the sidelines. The
future will not belong to the cynics. The future belongs to those who
believe in the beauty of their dreams.”---Paul Wellstone

Aristotle: Rhetoric is "the faculty of discovering in any particular case all of the available means of persuasion."

Quintillian: "Rhetoric is the art of speaking well."

Francis Bacon: Rhetoric is the application of reason to imagination "for the better moving of the will."

Kenneth Duva Burke (May 5, 1897 – November 19, 1993) was a major American literary theorist and philosopher. Burke's primary interests were in rhetoric and aesthetics.

"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."
"Wherever there is persuasion, there is rhetoric, and wherever there is rhetoric, there is meaning."

Andrea Lunsford: "Rhetoric is the art, practice, and study of human communication."

Francis Bacon (1561-1626): Advancement of Learning
The duty and office of rhetoric is to apply reason to imagination for the better moving of the will.