Kenneth L. Pike's Quotes

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

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

Christianity stands or falls as a living program, a way of life, made concrete in the life of man by the life of God through the life of the concretely living Christ.

So I see that Christianity in believing in a Creator pulls together more facts, data, inner experience and ability than any mechanistic view could hold for me.

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.

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.

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.

Acceptance of the power of God in one's life lays the groundwork for personal commitment to both science and Christianity, which so often have been in conflict.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Courage to continue comes from deeper sources than outward results.

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

God cannot be reduced to a sample for analysis.

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

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

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

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.

Nobody is as good as he thinks he is.

Outward failure may be a manifested variant of inward success.