Kenneth Burke Quotes

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

Wherever there is persuasion, there is rhetoric, and wherever there is rhetoric, there is meaning.

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.

Stories are equipment for living.

The progress of human enlightenment can go no further than in picturing people not as vicious, but as mistaken.

Words are like planets, each with its own gravitational pull.

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

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

Dignity belongs to the conquered.

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.

Man is rotten with perfection.

Language does our thinking for us.

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.

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.

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.