Kenneth Burke Quotes

17 Sourced Quotes

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
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 persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his

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
… 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
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
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
If decisions were a choice between alternatives, decisions would come easy. Decision is the selection and formulation of alternatives.

Kenneth Burke
The use of words by human agents to form attitudes or induce actionsin other human agents.

Kenneth Burke
Even if any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by its very nature as a terminology it must be a selection of reality; and to this extent it must function also as a deflection of reality,

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

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
Man is/the symbol-using (symbol making, symbol-misusing) animal/inventor of the negative (or moralized by the negative)/separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making/goaded by the spirit of hierarchy (or moved by the sense of order)/and rotten with perfection.

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
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 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