Quotes By Kenneth L. Pike

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.

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

Outward failure may be a manifested variant of inward success.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

Nobody is as good as he thinks he is.

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.