Both ignorance and the old metaphysics tend to produce these undesirable nervous effects of reversed order and so non-survival evaluation. If we use the nervous ystem in a way which is against its survival structure, we must expect non-survival. Human history is short, but already we have astonishing records of extinction.

— Alfred Korzybski

Alfred Korzybski Quotes

The present non-aristotelian system is based on fundamental negative premises; namely, the complete denial of ‘identity.’

— Alfred Korzybski

I want to make clear only that words are not the things spoken about, and that there is no such thing as an object in absolute isolation.

— Alfred Korzybski

Whatever you say it is, is simply what YOU SAY it is.

— Alfred Korzybski

To use words to sense reality is like going with a lamp to search for darkness.

— Alfred Korzybski

Identity is invariably false to facts.

— Alfred Korzybski

We see what we see because we miss all the finer details.

— Alfred Korzybski

Ignorance is no excuse when once we know that ignorance is the only possible excuse.

— Alfred Korzybski

There is every reason why the standards in our civilization are so low, because we have “poisoned,” in a literal sense of the word, our minds with the physico-chemical effects of wrong ideas.

— Alfred Korzybski

Whatever we may say will not be the objective level, which remains fundamentally un-speakable. Thus, we can sit on the object called ‘a chair’, but we cannot sit on the noise we made or the name we applied to that object.

— Alfred Korzybski

The abuse of symbolism is like the abuse of food or drink: it makes people ill, and so their reactions become deranged.

— Alfred Korzybski

Definitions create conditions.

— Alfred Korzybski

Law was always made by the few and in general for the purpose of preserving the “existing order,” or for the reestablishment of the old order and the punishment of the offenders against it.

— Alfred Korzybski

An individual cannot be considered entirely sane of he is wholly ignorant of scientific method and structure of nature and so retains primitive semantic reactions.

— Alfred Korzybski

Both ignorance and the old metaphysics tend to produce these undesirable nervous effects of reversed order and so non-survival evaluation. If we use the nervous ystem in a way which is against its survival structure, we must expect non-survival. Human history is short, but already we have astonishing records of extinction.

— Alfred Korzybski

We humans, through old habits, and because of the inherent structure of human knowledge have a tendency to make static, definite, and, in a way, absolutistic one-valued statements. But when we fight absolutism, we quite often establish, instead, some other dogma equally silly and harmful. For instance, an active atheist is psycho-logically as unsound as a rabid theist.

— Alfred Korzybski

If those who know why and how neglect to act, those who do not know will act, and the world will continue to flounder.

— Alfred Korzybski

The reader must be reminded that it takes a good ‘mind’ to be ‘insane’. Morons, imbeciles, and idiots are ‘mentally’ deficient, but could not be insane.

— Alfred Korzybski

Say wharever you choose about the object, and wharever you might say it is not. Or, in other words: wharever you might say the object is, well it is not.

— Alfred Korzybski

Indeed neither life nor science bothers about “essences”-they leave “essences” to metaphysics, which is neither life nor science.

— Alfred Korzybski

No reflecting reader can deny that the passing off, on an unsuspecting listener, of noises for words, or symbols, must be classified as a fraud, or that we pass to the other fellow contagious semantic disturbances.

— Alfred Korzybski
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