Kenneth Burke Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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 human agents to form attitudes or to induce actions in other human agents.

Kenneth Burke

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

Kenneth Burke

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

Kenneth Burke

#5. Man is rotten with perfection.

Kenneth Burke

#6. A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing.

Kenneth Burke

#7. 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

#8. 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 a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols.

Kenneth Burke

#9. 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

#10. Stories are equipment for living.

Kenneth Burke

#11. Language does our thinking for us.

Kenneth Burke

#12. With my book in one hand
And my drink in the other
What more could I want

But fame,
Better health,
And ten million dollars?

Kenneth Burke

#13. 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

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

Kenneth Burke

#15. Dignity belongs to the conquered.

Kenneth Burke

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

Kenneth Burke

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

Kenneth Burke

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. The universe would appear to be something like a piece of cheese; it can be sliced in an infinite number of ways- and when one has chosen his own pattern of slicing, he finds that other men's cuts fall at the wrong places.

Kenneth Burke

#21. 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