The Elements of Rhetoric -- How to Write and Speak Clearly and Persuasively Quotes

“Men and women make decisions. Decisions repeated form a habit; the sum of your habits adds up to the value of your character. Sooner or later someone you respect is going to ask: What is yours worth?”
― Ryan N.S. Topping, The Elements of Rhetoric -- How to Write and Speak Clearly and Persuasively: A Guide for Students, Teachers, Politicians & Preachers

“Moderns maintain a peculiar relationship with rhetoric. We no longer teach it to our young, nor demand it of our wise. What since ancient Athens was considered an essential skill for a free citizen has now largely been consigned to hucksters and to the tarmacs of used car dealerships. The tragedy is that we abandoned the art on purpose. About the same time the Russians flung Sputnik into space, in the name of progress American, Canadian, and British educators tossed the old grammar and style books onto the intergalactic rubbish heap of history. The past was trashed. In a scientific age, so the reasoning went, questions of philosophy, of beauty, of sex, of God, could be set aside in favor of technological solutions. The science was settled. Just the same, the timing couldn’t have been worse. Who would’ve foreseen that at the same hour the West turned its back on its humanistic traditions, it would be called to police the global order, shore up markets, and shoot down terrorists?”
― Ryan N.S. Topping, The Elements of Rhetoric -- How to Write and Speak Clearly and Persuasively: A Guide for Students, Teachers, Politicians & Preachers

“It may be true that the law can’t change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless. It may be true that the law can’t make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important also. (Martin Luther King, Jr., Address to Ohio Northern University, 1968)”
― Ryan N.S. Topping, The Elements of Rhetoric -- How to Write and Speak Clearly and Persuasively: A Guide for Students, Teachers, Politicians & Preachers

“About the time the Beatles started to write songs, a group of linguists concocted a theory that modern people are too dumb to read books older than Curious George; so the experts decided to re-write them. In the 1970s, committees began to re-translate, notably, both the Bible and liturgical books.”
― Ryan N.S. Topping, The Elements of Rhetoric -- How to Write and Speak Clearly and Persuasively: A Guide for Students, Teachers, Politicians & Preachers

“Whereas grammar governs conventions for clear speech among men, logic is the language of God. Up until the Second World War nearly anyone who passed through a European or American university would have taken a basic course in logic structured around what is known as “the three acts of the mind.” One reason why a grasp of the three acts is useful is that it can help you spot the mistake that lies behind the most common logical fallacies.”
― Ryan N.S. Topping, The Elements of Rhetoric -- How to Write and Speak Clearly and Persuasively: A Guide for Students, Teachers, Politicians & Preachers

“You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. (C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 1952)”
― Ryan N.S. Topping, The Elements of Rhetoric -- How to Write and Speak Clearly and Persuasively: A Guide for Students, Teachers, Politicians & Preachers

“Whereas grammar governs conventions for clear speech among men, logic is the language of God.”
― Ryan N.S. Topping, The Elements of Rhetoric -- How to Write and Speak Clearly and Persuasively: A Guide for Students, Teachers, Politicians & Preachers