Quotes About Korzybski

And how much more do we need Korzybski's consciousness of abstracting at a time when so much of our lives are spent absorbed in the highly abstracted and mediated maps rendered by our digital technologies, new media, and online communications?

Or, as Einstein once said — quoted by Korzybski in Science and Sanity — Insofar as the laws of mathematics are certain, they do not refer to reality; and insofar as they refer to reality, they are not certain.

Back in 1933 — Lawdee-me, doesn't that seem like the Dark Ages now? — both von Neumann and Korzybski proposed non-Aristotelian logics, as I mentioned many chapters ago. Von Neumann just allowed for a "maybe" (1/2) between true (1) and false (0); Korzybski extended the "maybe" as far as you want — or as far as data allows you to calculate probabilities.

As Korzybski said once (violating his own ideal of E-Prime) "Allness is an illness." In fact, the F-scale, invented by Adorno and used to measure fascist tendencies, does show a correlation between heavy use of "allness" statements and the fascist personality. Can you imagine a full page by any fascist (or any red fascist) without reckless generalizations about all members of some scapegoat group?

According to Korzybski (Science and Sanity) there is one field, and one field only, in which it is legitimate to ascribe predicates to groups—namely, in pure mathematics. This is legitimate because the groups or sets of pure math are purely abstract and created by definition. All k are x, in a mathematical context, because k and x are defined that way, and because they do not exist outside of pure thought.