Quotes from Kenneth L. Pike

If language did not affect behavior, it could have no meaning.

There is no truth without responsibility following in its wake.

Identity in the form of continuity of personality is an extremely important characteristic of the individual.

Without a possibility of change in meanings human communication could not perform its present functions.

Normal social behavior requires that we be able to recognize identities in spite of change. Unless we can do so, there can be no human society as we know it.

The detached observer's view is one window on the world.

The view of the local scene through the eyes of a native participant in that scene is a different window.

Nobody is as good as he thinks he is.

The price that one pays for refusing to act on the truth as one sees it, is to be led to believe untruth to avoid guilt.

Language is a tool adequate to provide any degree of precision relevant to a particular situation.

This required the development of a view which allowed one to integrate research with belief, thing with person, fact with aesthetics, knowledge with application of knowledge.

Today's practicality is often no more than the accepted form of yesterday's theory.

If the scholar feels that he must know everything about any topic, he is in trouble - and will not publish with a clear conscience.

Fruitful discourse in science or theology requires us to believe that within the contexts of normal discourse there are some true statements.

That a society controls, to a greater or lesser extent, the behavior of its members is a universal but the methods, the particulars of that control, vary from one culture to another.

Normal social behavior requires that we be able to recognize identities in spite of change. Unless we can do so, there can be no human society as we know it.

Without a possibility of change in meanings human communication could not perform its present functions.

With acknowledgement of residues, we can be more easily prepared to grant the unit of science, the overlapping of disciplines, and the total coherence of all facts.

Outward failure may be a manifested variant of inward success.

Courage to continue comes from deeper sources than outward results.

Acceptance of the power of God in one's life lays the groundwork for personal commitment to both science and Christianity, which so often have been in conflict.

This required the development of a view which allowed one to integrate research with belief, thing with person, fact with aesthetics, knowledge with application of knowledge.

Courage to continue comes from deeper sources than outward results.

It is also, I would guess, a universal that in all societies people value respectability granted to them.