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.

The progress of human enlightenment can go no further than in picturing people not as vicious, but as mistaken.

Even if any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by its very nature as a terminology it must be a selection of reality; and to this extent it must function also as a deflection of reality.

Words are like planets, each with its own gravitational pull.

Our purpose is simply to ask how theological principles can be shown to have usable secular analogues that throw light upon the nature of language.

You persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his