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

Alfred Korzybski

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Alfred Korzybski
Age: 70 †
Born: 1879
Born: July 3
Died: 1950
Died: March 1
Engineer
Linguist
Mathematician
Philosopher
Warszawa
Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski
Forgiving
Nervous
Integrity
Conscience
Sin
System
May
Sins
Forgive

More quotes by Alfred Korzybski

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Identification makes general sanity and complete adjustment impossible. Training in non-identity plays a therapeutic role with adults.
Alfred Korzybski
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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
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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
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If all people learned to think in the non Aristotelian manner of quantum mechanics, the world would change so radically that most of what we call stupidity and even a great deal of what we consider insanity might disappear, and the intractable problems of war, poverty and injustice would suddenly seem a great deal closer to solution.
Alfred Korzybski
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To use words to sense reality is like going with a lamp to search for darkness.
Alfred Korzybski
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The map is not the territory.
Alfred Korzybski
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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.
Alfred Korzybski
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The present non-aristotelian system is based on fundamental negative premises namely, the complete denial of 'identity.'
Alfred Korzybski
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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
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He who learns and learns and yet does not know what he knows, is one who plows and plows yet never sows.
Alfred Korzybski
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We see what we see because we miss all the finer details.
Alfred Korzybski
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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
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Second order effects, such as belief in belief, makes fanaticism.
Alfred Korzybski
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Riches I need not, nor man's empty praise.
Alfred Korzybski
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Whatever you might say the object is, well it is not.
Alfred Korzybski
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Words don't mean, people mean.
Alfred Korzybski
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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
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It seems evident that everything which exists in nature, is natural, no matter how simple or complicated a phenomenon it is and on no occasion can the so-called 'supernatural' be anything else than a completely natural law, though it may, at the moment, be above and beyond the present understanding.
Alfred Korzybski
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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
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Identity is invariably false to facts.
Alfred Korzybski