Kenneth Burke Quotes

Language is a weapon of politicians, but language is a weapon in much of human affairs.

I am not very conscious of the figures of speech that I use.

RHETORIC The art of making life less believable; the calculated use of language, not to alarm but to do full harm to our busy minds and properly dispose our listeners to a pain they have never dreamed of. The context of what can be known establishes that love and indifference are forms of language, but the wise addition of punctuation allows us to believe that there are other harms - the dash gives the reader the clear signal they are coming.

rhetoric is will doing the work of imagination.

Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.

It applies even more to politicians because they are living, breathing embodiments of the language that they use. And it's why how you start the conversation, and how you end it, matters so much.

Similes prove nothing, but yet greatly lighten and relieve the tedium of argument.

I do like to turn a phrase, but it's all about how you turn it.

People pay attention to what a President says, whether or not he pauses for emphasis in the right places. Sometimes they even read the text.

Regan’s greatness as a rhetorician was in his delivery not in the content of what he said as with Churchill and Roosevelt.

I must say I'm not very fond of oratory that's so full of energy it hasn't any room for facts.

Political speeches are a particularly low form of rhetoric.

If you track something like a political campaign and parcel out what's being communicated in a literal and narrative sense, and what's being communicated by means of emotional and symbolic language, you might find that it's the latter elements that absolutely dominate and move people. It makes me want to take that language and expose it.

At some point early on, I realized that three of the greatest speeches ever delivered were by Winston Churchill, and they were written and delivered within a four-week period of each other.

The way you write affects what you say.

We know that words cannot move mountains, but they can move the multitude; and men are more ready to fight and die for a word than for anything else. Words shape thought, stir feeling, and beget action; they kill and revive, corrupt and cure. The "men-of-words"- priests, prophets, intellectuals- have played a more decisive role in history than military leaders, statesmen, and businessmen.

Words mean nothing to liberals. They say whatever will help advance their cause at the moment, switch talking points in a heartbeat, and then act indignant if anyone uses the exact same argument they were using five minutes ago.

It is through symbols that man consciously or unconsciously lives, works and has his being.

[This] is very important to remember when reading or writing or talking or whatever: You are never, ever choosing whether to use symbols. You are choosing which symbols to use.

When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock -- to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.

What I am trying to do when I use symbols is to awaken in your unconscious some reaction. I am very conscious of what I am using because symbols can be very dangerous. When we use normal language we can defend ourselves because our society is a linguistic society, a semantic society. But when you start to speak, not with words, but only with images, the people cannot defend themselves.

Metaphors convince at once or not at all.

I know if you talk faster and use more ten-dollar words than everyone around you, you convince half of them that they should shut up because you know what you're talking about.

There is a narrow class of uses of language where you intend to communicate. Communication refers to an effort to get people to understand what one means. And that, certainly, is one use of language and a social use of it. But I don't think it is the only social use of language. Nor are social uses the only uses of language.

Wit has its place in debate; in controversy it is a legitimate weapon, offensive and defensive.