Kenneth Burke Quotes

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

Wherever there is persuasion, there is rhetoric, and wherever there is rhetoric, there is meaning. ~ Kenneth Burke

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

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

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

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. ~ Kenneth Burke

Kenneth Burke calls form the satisfaction of an expectation; The Man Who Loved Children is full of such satisfactions, but it has a good deal of the deliberate disappointment of an expectation that is also form. ~ Randall Jarrell

A writer without authority? Impossible. as Kenneth Burke says, creation implies authority in the sense of originator ... ~ John Geddes

Dignity belongs to the conquered. ~ Kenneth Burke

Man is rotten with perfection. ~ Kenneth Burke

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

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

A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing. ~ Kenneth Burke

Every question selects a field of battle. ~ Kenneth Burke

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. ~ Kenneth Burke

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

Language does our thinking for us. ~ Kenneth Burke

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

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

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

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

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

Expand your mind to expand your life to expand your consciousness.... ~ Kenneth G. Ortiz

I got married, other people went off. We had sort of another public-we were our entire readership for many years, and we were very excited by each other. ~ Kenneth Koch

The grave is a common treasury, to which we must all be taken. ~ Edmund Burke

No, not horror. Enlightenment. ~ Tim W. Burke

Buy a stock at two, have it go to 30. You feel like you're on top of the world. ~ Kenneth Langone

A vast province has now subsisted, and subsisted in a considerable degree of health and vigor for near a twelvemonth, without Governor, without public Council, without judges, without executive magistrates. How long it will continue in this state, or what may arise out of this unheard-of situation, how can the wisest of us conjecture? Our late experience has taught us that many of those fundamental principles, formerly believed infallible, are either not of the importance they were imagined to be, or that we have not at all adverted to some other far more important and far more powerful principles, which entirely overrule those we had considered as omnipotent. ~ Edmund Burke

I believe demolishing Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk. Let me give simple, responsible reasons: (1) It was a cakewalk last time; (2) they've become much weaker; (3) we've become much stronger; and (4) now we're playing for keeps. ~ Kenneth Adelman

Jimmie would forever be the Renaissance humanist, bearing his faith and optimism like a white light inside a chalice. ~ James Lee Burke

The bar was pulsating with rock music and packed with partiers, all set to leave their inhibitions, and their sobriety, behind. ~ Kenneth Eade

A perfect equality will indeed be produced; that is to say, equal want, equal wretchedness, equal beggary, and on the part of the partitioners, a woeful, helpless, and desperate disappointment. Such is the event of all compulsory equalizations. They pull down what is above. They never raise what is below: and they depress high and low together beneath the level of what was originally the lowest. [Thoughts and Details on Scarcity] ~ Edmund Burke

The story of liberalism, as liberals tell it, is rather like the legend of St. George and the dragon. After many centuries of hopelessness and superstition, St. George, in the guise of Rationality, appeared in the world somewhere about the sixteenth century. The first dragons upon whom he turned his lance were those of despotic kingship and religious intolerance. These battles won, he rested for a time, until such questions as slavery, or prison conditions, or the state of the poor, began to command his attention. During the nineteenth century, his lance was never still, prodding this way and that against the inert scaliness of privilege, vested interest, or patrician insolence. But, unlike St. George, he did not know when to retire. The more he succeeded, the more he became bewitched with the thought of a world free of dragons, and the less capable he became of ever returning to private life. He needed his dragons. He could only live by fighting for causes - the people, the poor, the exploited, the colonially oppressed, the underprivileged and the underdeveloped. As an ageing warrior, he grew breathless in his pursuit of smaller and smaller dragons - for the big dragons were now harder to come by. ~ Kenneth Minogue

Silence is golden but when it threatens your freedom it's yellow. ~ Edmund Burke

She was addicted to literature like some people were addicted to heroin. ~ Allie Burke

I'm continuing to produce and will start a new record soon, as well. ~ Kenneth Edmonds

I hope I never need to believe in God. It would be an awful confession of failure. ~ Kenneth Tynan

The mature man lives quietly, does good privately, takes responsibility for his actions, treats others with friendliness and courtesy, finds mischief boring and avoids it. Without the hidden conspiracy of goodwill, society would not endure an hour. ~ Kenneth Rexroth

Be careful, he says, the official US position will be that they refuse to negotiate for hostages, but they may try to enlist the U.N. to do it. ~ Kenneth Cain

Forget? No." Conner frowned. "It has been decades, and I still remember every detail about her: her smell, her touch, the way her voice hummed in my ears. Why would I want to forget any of that? Those memories are my treasures. ~ H.L. Burke

Economic problems have no sharp edges. They shade off imperceptibly into politics, sociology, and ethics. Indeed, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the ultimate answer to every economic problem lies in some other field. ~ Kenneth E. Boulding

Being a son, brother, uncle and brother-in-law is all I care about. ~ Chris Burke

The notion of a formal structure of command must be abandoned. It is more useful to think of the mature corporation as a series of concentric circles. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

In old days men had the rack. Now they have the Press. That is an improvement certainly. But still it is very bad, and wrong, and demoralizing. Somebody - was it Burke? - called journalism the fourth estate. That was true at the time no doubt. But at the present moment it is the only estate. It has eaten up the other three. The Lords Temporal say nothing, the Lords Spiritual have nothing to say, and the House of Commons has nothing to say and says it. We are dominated by Journalism. ~ Oscar Wilde

I sometimes subscribe to the belief that all historical events occur simultaneously, like a dream in the mind of God. Perhaps it is only man who views time sequentially and tries to impose a solar calendar upon it. What if other people, both dead and unborn, are living out their lives in the same space we occupy, without our knowledge or consent?
The Glass Rainbow, p. 138 ~ James Lee Burke

I take full responsibility for what happened at Enron. But saying that, I know in my mind that I did nothing criminal. ~ Kenneth Lay

There have been 14 versions that I can find of Burke & Hare movies. They have all been horror films and all the movies have taken place in Victorian times, which doesn't make any sense. ~ John Landis

Some years ago John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in an essay on his efforts at writing a history of economics: 'As one approaches the present, one is filled with a sense of hopelessness; in a year and possibly even a month, there is now more economic comment in the supposedly serious literature than survives from the whole of the thousand years commonly denominated as the Middle Ages ... anyone who claims to be familiar with it all is a confessing liar.' I believe that all physicists would subscribe to the same sentiments regarding their own professional literature. I do at any rate. ~ Abraham Pais

It's much easier to point out the problem than it is to say just how it should be solved. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

I think that the special thing about radio is the off switch. If something's not pleasing you, turn it off. ~ Kenneth Goldsmith

Secret elisions within families are suddenly revealed by self-execution, and just as quickly sheeted with excuses, blame, and counter-blame. But sense is made of the world only through relationship between action and reaction, symptom and cause. No change is possible without analysis of accountability. ~ Antonella Gambotto-Burke

That is the problem with repressed memory and dissociative identity disorder. Your mind represses certain traumas for reasons of pure survival. And then you learn that to survive as an adult, you must uncover the memories, find the parts, and relieve the traumas. The contradiction is almost too much for the mind to comprehend and for the heart and soul to endure. ~ Suzie Burke