Kenneth L. Pike Quotes

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

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.

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

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?

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

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

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.

There is no truth without responsibility following in its wake.

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

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

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 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 detached observer’s view is one window on the world.

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.

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.

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

Outward failure may be a manifested variant of inward success.

Nobody is as good as he thinks he is.

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

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