Sam Leith > Quotes

“Being anti-rhetoric is, finally, just another rhetorical strategy. Rhetoric is what the other guy is doing—whereas you, you’re just speaking the plain truth as you see it.”
― Sam Leith, Words Like Loaded Pistols: Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama

“If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, as the old bumper sticker has it, baffle them with bullshit.

"Words Like Loaded Pistols" -- Page 99”
― Sam Leith

“A publishing acquaintance suggests an analogy with music: jazz is more complex than blues. It’s harder to play and harder to appreciate. That doesn’t mean there isn’t lots of good blues and lots of bad jazz. It doesn’t mean that jazz is an innately superior artform. It simply describes a formal difference between the two…All this is not to say that some difficult novels are not truly ghastly. If hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, you could say that pretentiousness is the tribute that mediocrity pays to genius.”
― Sam Leith

“We live, thanks to the reach of our technologies, in perhaps the most argumentative age of any in history.”
― Sam Leith, You Talkin' To Me?: Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama

“Cory Doctorow’s matchless description of the internet as ‘an ecosystem of interruption technologies’.”
― Sam Leith, Write to the Point: How to be Clear, Correct and Persuasive on the Page

“Perhaps most important of all, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, you will be seeking to persuade your audience that you are one of them: that your interests and their interests are identical in this case or, to be more convincing, in all cases.”
― Sam Leith, Words Like Loaded Pistols: Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama