Quotes from 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.

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.

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.

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

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

A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing--a focus upon object A involves a neglect of object B.

How could a choice be called free when its consequences are unknown at the time of our choosing?

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.

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.

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

Surely, it would not take much to distinguish between the character of a person who foresaw a world ending "not with a bang but a whimper," and one who feared some mighty holocaust, as were the planets ripped into smithereens by explosions from within.

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.

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.

For you become your own audience, in some respects a very lax one, in some respects very exacting, when you become involved in psychologically stylistic subterfuges for presenting your own case to yourself in sympathetic terms (and even terms that seem harsh can often be found on closer scrutiny to be flattering, as with neurotics who visit sufferings upon themselves in the name of very high-powered motives which, whatever their discomfiture, feed pride).

For rhetoric as such is not rooted in any past condition of human society. It is rooted in an essential function of language itself, a function that is wholly realistic, and is continually born anew; the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols.

The quickest way to demonstrate the sheer symbolicity of the negative is to look at any object, say, a table, and to remind yourself that, though it is exactly what it is, you could go on for the rest of your life saying all the things that it is not. "It is not a book, it is not a house, it is not Times Square," etc., etc.

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

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.

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?

Speech in its essence is not neutral.

Ecology teaches us "that the total economy of the planet cannot be guided by an efficient rationale of exploitation alone," wrote Burke more than 70 years ago, "but that the exploiting part must eventually suffer if it too greatly disturbs the balance of the whole.

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

Every question selects a field of battle.

It's more complicated than that." TL in "The Rhetoric of Religion