Kenneth L. Pike

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

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

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

“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.”

“Identity in the form of continuity of personality is an extremely important characteristic of the individual.”

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

“God cannot be reduced to a sample for analysis.”

“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.”

“There is no truth without responsibility following in its wake.”

“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.”

“Outward failure may be a manifested variant of inward success.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“Fruitful discourse in science or theology requires us to believe that within the contexts of normal discourse there are some true statements.”

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