On persuasion..................

A rhetorician of times past said that his trade was to make little things appear and be thought great.  That's s shoemaker who can make big shoes for a small foot.  They would have had him whipped in Sparta for professing a deceitful and lying art.  And I believe Archidamus, who was king of Sparta, did not hear without astonishment the answer of Thucydides when he asked him who was better in wrestling, Pericles or he:  "That," he said, "would be hard to establish; for when I have thrown him in wrestling, he persuades those who saw it happen that he did not fall, and he wins the prize."

-Michel De Montaigne, from his essay Of the vanity of words