Topic: Rhetoric

Quotes

Dierdre McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics (1985)

• Rhetoric is an economics of language, the study of how scarce means are allocated to the insatiable desires of people to be heard.#
• Unexamined metaphor is a substitute for thinking—which is a recommendation to examine the metaphors, not to attempt the impossible by banishing them.#
• The opportunity cost of enchanting one’s fellow economists is alienating noneconomists. There is no such thing as a free argument.#

C.S. Lewis, Rehabilitations and Other Essays (1939)

• The meaning in any given composition is in inverse ratio to the author’s belief in his own literalness.#Quoted in Dierdre McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics (1985)

Chaim Perelman, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation (1958)

• The acceptance of an analogy . . . is often equivalent to a judgment as to the importance of the characteristics that the analogy brings to the fore.#Quoted in Dierdre McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics (1985)

Walker Gibson, “Authors, Speakers, Readers, and Mock Readers” (1950)

• A bad book is a book in whose mock reader we discover a person we refuse to become, a mask we refuse to put on, a role we will not play.#Quoted in Dierdre McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics (1985)

Aristotle, Rhetoric (350 B.C.)

• If it be objected that one who uses such power of speech unjustly might do great harm, that is a charge which may be made in common against all good things except virtue, and above all against the things that are most useful.#Quoted in Dierdre McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics (1985)