Quotes on Rhetoric, please email me with any suggestions for inclusion
‘…rhetoric arises among a people who still live in mythic images and who have not yet experienced the unqualified need of historical accuracy: they would rather be persuaded than instructed…Thus, it is an essentially republican art: one must be accustomed to tolerating the most unusual opinions and points of view and even to taking a certain pleasure in their counterplay; one must be just as willing to listen as to speak…’ Friedrich Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language, 3
‘Rhetoric is the counterpart of dialectic’; Plato, Rhetoric, 1356a
‘Rhetoric is nothing other than the interpretation of concrete being-there, the hermeneutic of being-there itself’ Martin Heidegger, Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy, 75
‘…rhetoric…the art of listening.’ Daniel M. Gross, Heidegger and Rhetoric, 3
‘Rhetoric is the art of transacting a serious business of the understanding as if it were a free play of the imagination; poetry that of conducting a free play of the imagination as if it were a serious business of the understanding.’ Kant, The Critique of Judgment, (trans. Creed Meredith, 1961), 184-8
Derek Hampson 