Kenneth Pike Quotes

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

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

"There is no truth without responsibility following in its wake."

"Language is not merely a set of unrelated sounds, clauses, rules, and meanings; it is a total coherent system of these integrating with each other, and with behavior, context, universe of discourse, and observer perspective."

"If I were to adopt pure mechanism as a philosophy, there would be no way I could choose to be a scholar."

"Courage to continue comes from deeper sources than outward results."

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

"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."

"God cannot be reduced to a sample for analysis."

"Outward failure may be a manifested variant of inward success."

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

"Nobody is as good as he thinks he is."

"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."

"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."

"Verbal and nonverbal activity is a unified whole, and theory and methodology should be organized or created to treat it as such."

"Revelation and the nature of truth must be viewed in reference to the structure of language."

"We assume, to begin with, that the individual is at least as complex in his internal structure as the language is which he speaks - otherwise, how could he speak a language which is complex?"

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

"The universe extends beyond the mind of man, and is more complex than the small sample one can study."

"I wanted a theory that would allow one to live outside the office with the same philosophy one uses inside it."