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Men seek for vocabularies that are reflections of reality. To this end, they must develop vocabularies that are selections of reality. And any selection of reality must, in certain circumstances, function as a deflection of reality.

— Kenneth Burke On Symbols and Society (1989)

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Truth

More quotes by Kenneth Burke

You moralistic dog—admitting a hierarchy in which you are subordinate, purely that you may have subordinates; licking the boots of a superior, that you may have yours in turn licked by an underling.

When finding that people held the same views as I, I persuaded myself that I held them differently.

God pity the man or the nation wise in proverbs, I told myself, for there is much misery and much error gone into the collecting of such a store.

We would not deny the mind; but merely remember that as the corrective of wrong thinking is right thinking, the corrective of all thinking is the body.

As for bravery: dead on the fields are millions who would have feared to wear a hat in inappropriate season, so I judged that brave warriors are dirt cheap as compared with untimid civilians.

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False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.

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Wars produce many stories of fiction, some of which are told until they are believed to be true.

Ulysses S. Grant Personal Memoirs of General U. S. Grant (1885)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Kenneth Burke (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.