Kenneth L. Pike Quotes

Nobody seriously believes in the social philosophies of the immediate past.

All societies are historical.

It's not that we need new ideas, but we need to stop having old ideas.

We are living in one of those rare moments in history when things may come apart and be put back together again in ways that will determine the future for decades or more, despite the endless innovations of technology.

We now know how things were in the '60s and how things have changed, but I don't think we appreciate how much things have changed.

An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: What does happen is that the opponents gradually die out.

There certainly have been a lot of changes, although they come in such gradations that most people have either forgotten, or, if they're too young, they never knew about them in the first place.

The spirit of the age is the very thing a great man changes.

Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it.

The modern proletarian class doesn't carry out its struggle according to a plan set out in some book or theory; the modern workers' struggle is a part of history, a part of social progress, and in the middle of history, in the middle of progress, in the middle of the fight, we learn how we must fight...

An idea consisting of a social crime in one age becomes the very religion of humanity in the next

Nations are liable to various revolutions in the state of their minds, and extent of their knowledge, as well as in their power and wealth ….

Technology is often not a prime mover but a second-order consequence of food surpluses, urbanization, secularism, political stability ... and other conditions that create a fertile climate for innovation.

The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.

The world we want to transform has already been worked on by history and is largely hollow. We must nevertheless be inventive enough to change it and build a new world.

What seems impossible today, may half a century hence have become commonplace.

What one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts; and the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did.

Change the instruments and you will change the entire social theory that goes with them

All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions. All change is the result of a change in the contemporary state of mind.

We have a lot of people revolutionizing the world because they've never had to present a working model.

He who today utters a bold truth that seems to shock some old institution with the premonition of destruction, and that scares men from their propriety, will a hundred years hence be regarded as a remarkably conservative man. And yet the people who stand peculiarly upon what they call the foundations of conservatism, and hold to hard, practical facts, now stand upon that which one hundred years ago was rank heresy.

History is not just the evolution of technology; it is the evolution of thought.

There is nothing to be learned from history anymore. We're in science fiction now.

Those who professed themselves unable to believe in the reality of human progress ought to cheer themselves up, as the students under examination had conceivably been cheered up, by a short study of the Middle Ages. The hydrogen bomb, the South African Government, Chioang Kaidick, Senator McCarthy himself, would then seem a light price to pay for no longer being in the Middle Ages.