Quotes By Kenneth L. Pike

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.

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.

God cannot be reduced to a sample for analysis.

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.

There is no truth without responsibility following in its wake.

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?

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Nobody is as good as he thinks he is.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Outward failure may be a manifested variant of inward success.

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.