Cicero Rhetoric Quotes

...if Clinton's answers come off as well-intended lectures, Obama is offering soaring sermons and generational opportunity. In 1960, the articulate Adlai Stevenson compared his own oratory unfavorably with John F. Kennedy's. "Do you remember," Stevenson said, "that in classical times when Cicero had finished speaking, the people said, 'How well he spoke,' but when Demosthenes had finished speaking, the people said, 'Let us march.' " At this hour, Obama is the Democrats' Demosthenes.

Cicero’s first law of rhetoric, that a speech must always contain at least one surprise.

One of these was Philo of Larisa, head of the Academy in Athens, founded by Plato three hundred years before. He inspired Cicero with a passion for philosophy, and in particular for the theories of Skepticism, which asserted that knowledge of the nature of things is in the nature of things unattainable. Such ideas were well judged to appeal to a student of rhetoric who had learned to argue all sides of a case.

Philo of Larisa, head of the Academy in Athens....inspired Cicero with a passion for philosophy, and in particular for the theories of Skepticism, which asserted that knowledge of the nature of things is in the nature of things unattainable. Such ideas were well judged to appeal to a student of rhetoric who had learned to argue all sides of a case. In his early twenties Cicero wrote the first two volumes of a work on 'inventin'--that is to say, the technique of finding ideas and arguments for a speech; in it he noted that the most important thing was 'that we do not recklessly and presumptuously assume something to be true.' This resolute uncertainty was to be a permanent feature of his thought.

The literatures of Greece and Rome comprise the longest, most complete and most nearly continuous record we have of what the strange creature known as Homo sapiens has been busy about in virtually every department of spiritual, intellectual and social activity. That record covers nearly twenty-five hundred years in an unbroken stretch of this animated oddity’s operations in poetry, drama, law, agriculture, philosophy, architecture, natural history, philology, rhetoric, astronomy, logic, politics, botany, zoölogy, medicine, geography, theology,—everything, I believe, that lies in the range of human knowledge or speculation. Hence the mind which has attentively canvassed this record is much more than a disciplined mind, it is an experienced mind. It has come, as Emerson says, into a feeling of immense longevity, and it instinctively views contemporary man and his doings in the perspective set by this profound and weighty experience. Our studies were properly called formative, because beyond all others their effect was powerfully maturing. Cicero told the unvarnished truth in saying that those who have no knowledge of what has gone before them must forever remain children; and if one wished to characterise the collective mind of this present period, or indeed of any period,—the use it makes of its powers of observation, reflection, logical inference,—one would best do it by the one word immaturity.

joke by any standards, ancient or modern. But their argument with Tiberius was a fundamental one, which framed Roman political debate for the rest of the Republic. Cicero, looking back from the middle of the next century, could present 133 BCE as a decisive year precisely because it opened up a major fault line in Roman politics and society that was not closed again during his lifetime: ‘The death of Tiberius Gracchus,’ he wrote, ‘and even before that the whole rationale behind his tribunate, divided a united people into two distinct groups [partes].’ This is a rhetorical oversimplification.

The first text book on the subject was Aristotle's Rhetoric which was written sometime between 322 and 320 B.C. In this book Aristotle defined rhetorical discourse "as the art of discovering all the available means of persuasion in any given case." During the Roman period great orators like Cicero and Quintilion also wrote some important books on the subject. They also agreed with Aristotle and defined rhetoric as the art of persuading an audience. At first it also included logic, that is, valid reasoning and the tricks or devices used in argument so as to produce intellectual and emotional effect on the audience in order to make them veer round the speaker's point of view. But today it means mostly the tricks.

Lamentations about the tribulations of public life, followed by celebrations of the bucolic splendor of retirement to rural solitude, had become a familiar, even formulaic, posture within the leadership class of the revolutionary generation, especially within the Virginia dynasty. Everyone knew the classical models of latter-day seclusion represented by Cincinnatus and described by Cicero and Virgil. Declarations of principled withdrawal from the hurly-burly of politics to the natural rhythms of one’s fields or farms had become rhetorical rituals. If Washington’s retirement hymn featured the “vine and fig tree,” Jefferson’s idolized “my family, my farm, and my books.” The motif had become so commonplace that John Adams, an aspiring Cicero himself, claimed that the Virginians had worn out the entire Ciceronian syndrome: “It seems the Mode of becoming great is to retire,” he wrote Abigail in 1796. “It is marvellous how political Plants grow in the shade.” Washington

The earliest memory treatises described two types of recollection: memoria rerum and memoria verborum, memory for things and memory for words. When approaching a text or a speech, one could try to remember the gist, or one could try to remember verbatim. The Roman rhetoric teacher Quintilian looked down on memoria verborum on the grounds that creating such a vast number of images was not only inefficient, since it would require a gargantuan memory palace, but also unstable. If your memory for a speech hinged on knowing every word, then not only did you have a lot more to remember, but if you forgot a single word, you could end up trapped in a room of your memory palace staring at a blank wall, lost and unable to move on. Cicero agreed that the best way to memorize a speech is point by point, not word by word, by employing memoria rerum. In his De Oratore, he suggests that an orator delivering a speech should make one image for each major topic he wants to cover, and place each of those images at a locus. Indeed, the word “topic” comes from the Greek word topos, or place. (The phrase “in the first place” is a vestige from the art of memory.)

from whom he gained much of his knowledge of the theory and practice of rhetoric.

In 46 BC, Cicero published the Stoic Paradoxes, dedicated to Marcus Brutus, who himself had strong Stoic leanings. In what was more a rhetorical exercise than a serious philosophical treatment, he explored six of the primary Stoic paradoxes: that virtue is the only good; that it is sufficient for happiness; that all virtues and vices are equal; that all fools are mad; that only the sage is truly free; that the wise person alone is rich.

To be a good speaker, you need to be a good thinker. To be a good thinker, you need to be a good human being. And to be a good human being, you need to love the truth and the world more than you love your sorry self.

In Hinduism, there is this notion that the word abstracts from the object, and that Brahman or God, being the ultimate abstraction, abstracts from the word. If reason and language are what separate us from the beasts, and bring us nearer to God, we should take care not to abuse the word. Those who speak only for themselves, or, out of spite, to make trouble and undermine the human project, ought to have the insight and the decency to shut up.

Knowledge, as they say, is power. But words are how we use, or exploit, or share, that power. The greatest knowledge is the knowledge of knowledge, without which we would have nothing worth saying. But the second greatest knowledge is the knowledge of words, without which we would not be able to say it.

During the Second World War, the Free World’s most powerful weapon was not the atomic bomb, but Churchill’s rhetoric— while, by some accounts, it was through the mouth that Hitler shot himself.

What a waste that so many who can think cannot speak, and so many who can speak cannot think, when, really, these two things ought to go hand in hand—or side by side, as they do in this book.

In truth, it is not for the sake of our opponents that we are arguing or debating. Often, our opponents are in any case unpersuadable, regardless of the merits of our argumentation and the polish of our performance. Instead, our true aim is to carry the audience, whom we should look upon as our judge and jury. In the long run, it is not this or that person but only public opinion that can settle a debate.

Preparing an artful and persuasive speech is a great deal of work. For me, kairos is also a matter of whether to speak at all. You shouldn’t speak if: you have nothing worth saying; you are unsure and keep changing your mind; you are not the best or most qualified person to speak on this subject; you are speaking out of some deep-seated grievance; you are speaking only or mostly to further your own interests; speaking won’t make a difference. In his Ethics, Aristotle says that the virtuous or great-souled man (megalopsychos) ought ‘to be sluggish and hold back except where great honour or a great work is at stake, and to be a man of few deeds, but of great and notable ones.’ Remember that speech is a divine instrument. When someone goes around giving lots of little, loud speeches, you can be sure that they are an idiot.

If your proof is insubstantial, you might instead begin with a vehement refutation in the hope that no one notices your lack of argument. Since Plato’s Phaedo, and even a little before, the Western mind has been marked by deep divisions or dualities, such as soul and body, mind and matter, reason and sense experience, reason and emotion, reality and appearance, good and evil, heaven and hell. This binary thinking carries over to dialectic and rhetoric, in which it is often one thing or the other, rather than both or several or neither. Thus, in the Western mind, knocking down your opponent’s argument is tantamount to validating your own. Notice that the very concept of a debate with an ‘opponent’ is confrontational, when the exercise could instead be cooperative and conversational, as in the Upanishads.