Kenneth Burke

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

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

“Man is the symbol-using animal.”

“Wherever there is persuasion, there is rhetoric. And wherever there is 'meaning,' there is 'persuasion.'”

“Stories are equipment for living.”

“The key term for the old rhetoric was 'persuasion' and its stress was upon deliberate design. The key term for the 'new' rhetoric would be 'identification.'”

“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.”

“What is involved, when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it?”

“A metaphor is a device for seeing something in terms of something else.”

“War is a disease of cooperation.”

“Our purpose is simply to ask how a vocabulary is used, not to ask whether it is 'true.'”

“For we are not dealing with something that is there, but with something that is going on.”

“All living things are critics.”

“Words are vectors, directions, and not inert replicas.”

“A definition is a symbolic act.”