Alfred Korzybski quotes

" There are two ways to slide easily through life to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking. " # Thoughts and Thinking # Doubt # Analysis

" The map is not the territory. " # Travel and Tourism # Memory # Planning

" Any proposition containing the word 'is' creates a linguistical structural confusion which will eventually give birth to serious fallacies. " # Language # Life and Living # Words

" It is amusing to discover, in the twentieth century, that the quarrels between two lovers, two mathematicians, two nations, two economic systems, usually assumed insoluble in a finite period should exhibit one mechanism, the semantic mechanism of identification -- the discovery of which makes universal agreement possible, in mathematics and in life. " # Mathematics # Love # Science and Scientists

" The word is not the thing. " # Words

" Any organism must be treated as-a-whole; in other words, that an organism is not an algebraic sum, a linear function of its elements, but always more than that. It is seemingly little realized, at present, that this simple and innocent-looking statement involves a full structural revision of our language... " # Learning # Language # Truth

" If we consider that all we deal with represents constantly changing sub-microscopic, interrelated processes which are not, and cannot be 'identical with themselves', the old dictum that 'everything is identical with itself' becomes in [today's understanding of the universe] a principle invariably false to facts." (Note: Korzybski used "1933" to specify the current understanding. This editor has subsituted the "more general" form: [today's understanding...]) " # Editing and Editors # Change # Writers and Writing

" The only link between the verbal and objective world is exclusively structural, necessitating the conclusion that the only content of all 'knowledge' is structural. Now structure can be considered as a complex of relations, and ultimately as multi-dimensional order. From this point of view, all language can be considered as names for unspeakable entities on the objective level, be it things or feelings, or as names of relations. In fact... we find that an object represents an abstraction of a low order produced by our nervous system as the result of a sub-microscopic events acting as stimuli upon the nervous system. " # Marriage # Language # Thoughts and Thinking

" The main thesis of this non-Aristotelian system is that as yet we all (with extremely few exceptions) copy animals in our nervous processes, and that practically all human difficulties, mental ills ... have this ... component. " # Education # Animals # Difficulties

" 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. " # Words # Life and Living # Symbols