Korzybski Quotes

#1. 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?

Alfred Korzybski

#2. The map is not the territory (coined by Alfred Korzybski), and the name is not the thing named.

Gregory Bateson

#3. All too easily, we confuse the world as we symbolize it with the world as it is. As semanticist Alfred Korzybski used to say, it is an urgent necessity to distinguish between the map and the territory and, he might have added, between the flag and the country.

Alan W. Watts

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

Alfred Korzybski

#5. Different 'philosophies' represent nothing but methods of evaluation, which may lead to empirical mis-evaluation if science and empirical facts are disregarded.

Alfred Korzybski

#6. Whatever you might say the object "is", well it is not.

Alfred Korzybski

#7. He who learns and learns and yet does not know what he knows, is one who plows and plows yet never sows.

Alfred Korzybski

#8. 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.

Alfred Korzybski

#9. Whatever you say it is, it isn't.

Alfred Korzybski

#10. Whatever you may say something is, it is not!

Alfred Korzybski

#11. One would have to say "in the end everything is a gag, etc" because everything is infinitely more than just a gag. The same applies to other "is"-statements such as "Laughter is an instant vacation"

Alfred Korzybski

#12. 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.

Alfred Korzybski

#13. Whatever you say about something, it is not.

Alfred Korzybski

#14. These 'philosophers', etc., seem unaware, to give a specific example, that by teaching and preaching 'identity', which is empirically non-existent in this actual world, they are neurologically training future generations in the pathological identifications found in the 'mentally' ill or maladjusted.

Alfred Korzybski

#15. Man's achievements rest upon the use of symbols ... we must consider ourselves as a symbolic, semantic class of life, and those who rule the symbols, rule us.

Alfred Korzybski

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

Alfred Korzybski

#17. I think therefore I seem to be.

Alfred Korzybski

#18. Any proposition containing the word "is" creates a linguistic structural confusion which will eventually give birth to serious fallacies.

Alfred Korzybski

#19. The objective level is not words, and cannot be reached by words alone. We must point our finger and be silent, or we will never reach this level.

Alfred Korzybski

#20. If words are not things, or maps are not the actual territory, then, obviously, the only possible link between the objective world and the linguistic world is found in structure, and structure alone.

Alfred Korzybski

#21. If a psychiatric and scientific inquiry were to be made upon our rulers, mankind would be appalled at the disclosures.

Alfred Korzybski

#22. Identity is invariably false to facts.

Alfred Korzybski

#23. What we call progress consists in coordinating ideas with realities.

Alfred Korzybski

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

Alfred Korzybski

#25. A person does what he does because he sees the world as he sees it.

Alfred Korzybski

#26. Mathematics and logic have been proved to be one; a fact from which it seems to follow that mathematics may successfully deal with non-quantitative problems in a much broader sense than was suspected to be possible.

Alfred Korzybski

#27. Let us repeat the two crucial negative premises as established firmly by all human experience: (1) Words are not the things we are speaking about; and (2) There is no such thing as an object in absolute isolation.

Alfred Korzybski

#28. Words don't mean, people mean.

Alfred Korzybski

#29. Psycho-galvonic experiments show clearly that every emotion or thought is always connected with some electrical current.

Alfred Korzybski

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

Alfred Korzybski

#31. It is now no mystery that some quite influential 'philosophers' were 'mentally' ill.

Alfred Korzybski

#32. 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.

Alfred Korzybski

#33. I care not so much what I am to others as what I am to myself. I will be rich by myself, and not by borrowing.

Alfred Korzybski

#34. Who rules our symbols, rules us.

Alfred Korzybski

#35. Any object of thought is both 'more than what we think, and different'.

Alfred Korzybski

#36. Every language having a structure, by the very nature of language, reflects in its own structure that of the world as assumed by those who evolved the language. In other words, we read unconsciously into the world the structure of the language we use.

Alfred Korzybski

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

Alfred Korzybski

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

Alfred Korzybski

#39. The map is not the territory, the word is not the thing it describes. Whenever the map is confused with the territory, a 'semantic disturbance' is set up in the organism. The disturbance continues until the limitation of the map is recognized.

Alfred Korzybski

#40. The fallacy that Morley in his life of Gladstone asserts to be the greatest affliction of politicians; it is indeed a common plague of humanity. It is:
The fallacy of attributing to one cause what is due to many causes.

Alfred Korzybski

#41. The map is not the territory ... The only usefulness of a map depends on similarity of structure between the empirical world and the map ...

Alfred Korzybski

#42. Identification makes general sanity and complete adjustment impossible. Training in non-identity plays a therapeutic role with adults.

Alfred Korzybski

#43. 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

#44. Second order effects, such as belief in belief, makes fanaticism.

Alfred Korzybski

#45. The map is not the territory.

Alfred Korzybski

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

Alfred Korzybski

#47. I am the same kind of moron as the rest of you, it's the method that does the work, for me as well as for you.

Alfred Korzybski

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

Alfred Korzybski

#49. 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

#50. God may forgive your sins, but your nervous system won't.

Alfred Korzybski

#51. Logic is the youth of mathematics, mathematics is the manhood of logic. This brilliant mot of the eminent philosopher of mathematics is no

Alfred Korzybski