“In confessing a reprehensible act, I would sometimes add a still more reprehensible interpretation—and whereas I might forget my own judgments upon myself, those in whom I had confided would carefully store them against me.”Kenneth Burke Source: Towards a Better Life (1966), p. 5
“I have seen you grow brutal under a vocabulary of love. If you wanted to thieve, your code would expand to embrace the act of thieving. Feeling no need to drink, you will promptly despise a drunkard.”Kenneth Burke Source: Towards a Better Life (1966), p. 10
“… the pattern of embarrassment behind the contemporary ideal of a language that will best promote good action by entirely eliminating the element of exhortation or command. Insofar as such a project succeeded, its terms would involve a narrowing of circumference to a point where the principle of personal action is eliminated from language, so that an act would follow from it only as a non-sequitur, a kind of humanitarian after-thought.”Kenneth Burke Source: A Grammar of Motives (1945), p. 90