Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
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The common dogma of fundamentalists is fear of modern knowledge, inability to cope with the fast change in a scientific-technological society, and the real breakdown in apparent moral order in recent years.... That is why hate is the major fuel, fear is the cement of the movement, and superstitious ignorance is the best defence against the dangerous new knowledge. ... When you bring up arguments that cast serious doubts on their cherished beliefs you are not simply making a rhetorical point, you are threatening their whole Universe and their immortality. That provokes anger and quite frequently violence. ... Unfortunately you cannot reason with them and you even risk violence in confronting them. Their numbers will decline only when society stabilizes, and adapts to modernity.
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In an extensive reading of recent books by psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, and inspirationalists, I have discovered that they all suffer from one or more of these expression-complexes: italicizing, capitalizing, exclamation-pointing, multiple-interrogating, and itemizing. These are all forms of what the psychos themselves would call, if they faced their condition frankly, Rhetorical-Over-Compensation.
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From Chirac and Schroeder we have seen a rhetorical commitment for France and Germany to co-operate but when they have combined it has been to block reforms. They have not produced an actual agenda for advancing the union, unlike the days of Helmut Kohl and Francois Mitterand, when France and Germany really were driving Europe.
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Art has always been this—pure interrogation, rhetorical question less the rhetoric—whatever else it may have been obliged by social realit...
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The poetry of this one is called philosophical, of that one philological, of a third rhetorical, and so on. Which is then the poetic poetry?
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Where would we be without rhetorical questions?
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