Kenneth L. Pike Sociologist Quotations

Today's practicality is often no more than the accepted form of yesterday's theory.

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

The price that one pays for refusing to act on the truth as one sees it, is to be led to believe untruth to avoid guilt.

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.

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

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

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.

Courage to continue comes from deeper sources than outward results.

When I conform to truth, I do not conform to an abstract principle; I conform to the nature of God.

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

With acknowledgement of residues, we can be more easily prepared to grant the unit of science, the overlapping of disciplines, and the total coherence of all facts.

Fruitful discourse in science or theology requires us to believe that within the contexts of normal discourse there are some true statements.

If language did not affect behavior, it could have no meaning.

God cannot be reduced to a sample for analysis.

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

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

The marvelous thing is that even in studying linguistics, we find that the universe as a whole is patterned, ordered, and to some degree intelligible to us.

The view of the local scene through the eyes of a native participant in that scene is a different window.

If the scholar feels that he must know everything about any topic, he is in trouble - and will not publish with a clear conscience.

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

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

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?

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

Nobody is as good as he thinks he is.

Outward failure may be a manifested variant of inward success.

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.

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

There is no truth without responsibility following in its wake.