Kenneth Burke Quotes

In the hands of the clergy, politics and jurisprudence, as well as other sciences, remained branches of theology, and were treated according to the principles prevailing in the latter. The dogmas of the church were at the same time political axioms, and Bible quotations had the validity of law in every court. Even after the formation of a special class of jurists, jurisprudence long remained under the tutelage of theology

You can't understand European history at all other than through religion, or English literature either if you can't recognise biblical allusions.

Tragedy is formed 'round ideas it does not expound, and to understand its history is, in some part, to understand those ideas and their place in the society that produced it.

Theology is a part of our lives. It's unavoidable. A thoughtless theology guides our lives with just as much force as a thoughtful and informed one.

Do you honestly believe God likes you, not just loves you because theologically God has to love you?

There is no absurdity in theology so great that you cannot parallel it by a greater absurdity in Nature.

Christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity.

Buddhism is a heresy on Hinduism. It was Hinduism that did the dirty work for Buddhism, by the time Buddha came along priest-craft was an ancient tradition in India.

I consider Christian theology to be one of the great disasters of the human race.

Moral Teleology supplies the deficiency in physical Teleology , and first establishes a Theology ; because the latter, if it did not borrow from the former without being observed, but were to proceed consistently, could only found a Demonology , which is incapable of any definite concept.

Religion is the eldest sister of philosophy: on whatever subjects they may differ, it is unbecoming in either to quarrel, and most so about their inheritance.

The contraction of theological influence has been at once the best measure, and the essential condition of intellectual advance.

There's a definite sense this morning on the part of the Kerry voters that perhaps this is code, 'moral values,' is code for something else. It's code for taking a different position about gays in America, an exclusionary position, a code about abortion, code about imposing Christianity over other faiths.

Muhammad professed to derive from Heaven, and he has inserted in the Koran, not only a body of religious doctrines, but political maxims, civil and criminal laws, and theories of science. The gospel, on the contrary, only speaks of the general relations of men to God and to each other - beyond which it inculcates and imposes no point of faith. This alone, besides a thousand other reasons, would suffice to prove that the former of these religions will never long predominate in a cultivated and democratic age, whilst the latter is destined to retain its sway at these as at all other periods.

Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Williams Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King - indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history - were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. To say that men and women should not inject their "personal morality" into public policy debates is a practical absurdity.

We shape our God, and then our God shapes us.

We can’t expect the nation to operate by Christian principles… but we can expect this of the church.

The principles of all genuine liberty, and of wise laws and administrations are to be drawn from the Bible and sustained by its authority. The man therefore who weakens or destroys the divine authority of that book may be assessory to all the public disorders which society is doomed to suffer.

The language of theism which was familiar to the people, gave Gandhi the advantage of easy communication with the people, but it is atheistic in principle. It could have been the starting point for the atheistic movement in the modern age.

I don't think that necessarily I was encouraged by the nuns and the priest to consider alternate possibilities to the universe.

What the Sermon describes in a graphic manner, the Bhagavadgita reduces to a scientific formula.

One man's pornography is another man's theology.

To me, there's a huge difference between criticism and reviewing. I really love reading good criticism of television and film. To me, a critic is someone who analyzes a show, describes it, talks about the people in it, puts it in historical context of other shows like it, compares it and stuff, and then talks about the intent of the show and whether it failed or didn't.

A book is judged, not by its reference to life, but by its reference to other books.

Politics is not religion and we should govern on the basis of evidence, not theology.