Deliberate Quote by Judith Butler

In the performance of an illocutionary act in the literal utterance of a sentence, the speaker intends to produce a certain effect by means…

— John Searle

The first requisite of style, not only in rhetoric, but in all compositions, is perspicuity.

— Richard Whately

“Words are action, and sentences represent a person’s mental action and aspirations.”

— Kilroy J. Oldster

An action is the perfection and publication of thought.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Words must be taken according to the matter whereof they are uttered.

— Richard Hooker

In exposition and in argument, the writer must likewise never lose his hold upon the concrete; and even when he is dealing with general…

— William Strunk, Jr

Since we want not emancipation from impulse but clarification of impulse, the duty of rhetoric is to bring together action and understanding into a…

— Richard M. Weaver

Better to think of writing, of what one does, as an activity, rather than an identity to keep the calling a verb rather than…

— Lorrie Moore

I shall develop the thesis that anyone acting communicatively must, in performing any speech act, raise universal validity claims and suppose that they can…

— Jurgen Habermas

A work should convey its entire meaning by itself, imposing it on the spectator even before he knows what the subject is.

— Marcel Proust

“Grammar is like the walls and bumpers of a pinball machine. Rhetoric is like the flippers of a pinball machine. You control the flippers.…

— Neal Stephenson

The discourse on the Text should itself be nothing other than text, research, textual activity, since the Text is that social space which leaves…

— Roland Barthes