Kenneth Burke Quotes

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?

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

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.

Every question selects a field of battle.

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.

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

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

Dignity belongs to the conquered.

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.

Language does our thinking for us.

Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.

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.

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

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.

Man is rotten with perfection.

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

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

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.

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.

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.