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.
Men seek for vocabularies that are reflections of reality. To this end, they must develop vocabularies that are selections of reality. And any selection of reality must, in certain circumstances, function as a deflection of reality.
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.
Stories are equipment for living.
Wherever there is persuasion, there is rhetoric, and wherever there is rhetoric, there is meaning.
The universe would appear to be something like a piece of cheese; it can be sliced in an infinite number of ways- and when one has chosen his own pattern of slicing, he finds that other men’s cuts fall at the wrong places.
A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing.
Words are like planets, each with its own gravitational pull.
The use of words by human agents to form attitudes or induce actionsin other human agents.
Dignity belongs to the conquered...
The progress of human enlightenment can go no further than in picturing people not as vicious, but as mistaken.
If decisions were a choice between alternatives, decisions would come easy. Decision is the selection and formulation of alternatives.
Language does our thinking for us.
Man is rotten with perfection.
For no continuity of social act is possible without a corresponding social status and the many different kinds of act required in an industrial state, with its high degree of specialization, make for corresponding classification of status.
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.
Creation implies authority in the sense of originator.
Creation implies authority in the sense of originator. The possibility of a ‘Fall’ is implied in a Covenant insofar as the idea of a Covenant implies the possibility of its being violated.