Kenneth Burke quotes

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. (Kenneth Burke)

We not only interpret the character of events... we may also interpret our interpretations.

Kenneth Burke

Dignity belongs to the conquered.

Kenneth Burke

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.

Kenneth Burke

You moralistic dog-admitting a hierarchy in which you are subordinate, purely that you may have subordinates; licking the boots of a superior, that you may have yours in turn licked by an underling.

Kenneth Burke

God pity the man or the nation wise in proverbs, I told myself, for there is much misery and much error gone into the collecting of such a store.

Kenneth Burke

We would not deny the mind; but merely remember that as the corrective of wrong thinking is right thinking, the corrective of all thinking is the body.

Kenneth Burke

In confessing a reprehensible act, I would sometimes add a still more reprehensible interpretation-and whereas I might forget my own judgments upon myself, those in whom I had confided would carefully store them against me.

Kenneth Burke

I have seen you grow brutal under a vocabulary of love. If you wanted to thieve, your code would expand to embrace the act of thieving. Feeling no need to drink, you will promptly despise a drunkard.

Kenneth Burke

... the pattern of embarrassment behind the contemporary ideal of a language that will best promote good action by entirely eliminating the element of exhortation or command. Insofar as such a project succeeded, its terms would involve a narrowing of circumference to a point where the principle of personal action is eliminated from language, so that an act would follow from it only as a non-sequitur, a kind of humanitarian after-thought.

Kenneth Burke

Upon my enquiring as to what he feared most of the future, he answered: "Destitution. Destitution of finances, destitution of mind, destitution of love. The inability to retort. The need of possessing one's opposite in years, sex, and texture of the skin; and the knowledge that by this need one has been made repugnant. The replacing of independence by solitude.”. (Kenneth Burke)

When finding that people held the same views as I, I persuaded myself that I held them differently.

Kenneth Burke

As for bravery: dead on the fields are millions who would have feared to wear a hat in inappropriate season, so I judged that brave warriors are dirt cheap as compared with untimid civilians.

Kenneth Burke

I felt that the man who strove for dignity, nobility, and honour should have his task made as difficult and as hazardous as possible, and that in particular he should be forgiven no lapses in style.

Kenneth Burke

Any performance is discussible either from the standpoint of what it attains or what it misses. Comprehensiveness can be discussed as superficiality, intensiveness as stricture, tolerance as uncertainty-and the poor pedestrian abilities of a fish are clearly explainable in terms of his excellence as a swimmer. A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing-a focus upon object A involves a neglect of object B.

Kenneth Burke

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.

Kenneth Burke

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.

Kenneth Burke