“… 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

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Kenneth Burke 11
American philosopher 1897–1993

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