Quotes from 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Thus, we see that one of the obvious origins of human disagreement lies in the use of noises for words.

Whatever you say about something, it is not.

There are two ways to slide easily through life; to believe everything or doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking.

It is a fallacy of the old schools to divide man into parcels, elements, thoughts, emotions, intuitions, etc. All human faculties consist of an interconnected whole.

Two important characteristics of maps should be noticed. A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.