Kenneth Burke Quotes

20 quotes in 236 categories

• 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…
• The progress of human enlightenment can go no further than in picturing people not as vicious, but as mistaken.
• The use of words by human agents to form attitudes or induce actionsin other human agents.
• Rhetoric is rooted in an essential function of language itself, a function that is wholly realistic and continually born anew: the use of language as…
• Wherever there is persuasion, there is rhetoric, and wherever there is rhetoric, there is meaning.
• 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…
• The most characteristic concern of rhetoric [is] the manipulation of men's beliefs for political ends....the basic function of rhetoric [is] the use of words by…
• 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…
• Stories are equipment for living.
• Dignity belongs to the conquered....
• Words are like planets, each with its own gravitational pull.
• 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
• 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…
• 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,…
• 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.
• We not only interpret the character of events... we may also interpret our interpretations.
• A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing.
• Creation implies authority in the sense of originator.
• If decisions were a choice between alternatives, decisions would come easy. Decision is the selection and formulation of alternatives.

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