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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
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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
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Words
Established
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Crucial
Two
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Object
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Negative
Isolation
More quotes by Alfred Korzybski
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
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
He who learns and learns and yet does not know what he knows, is one who plows and plows yet never sows.
Alfred Korzybski
Who rules our symbols, rules us.
Alfred Korzybski
Riches I need not, nor man's empty praise.
Alfred Korzybski
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
Identification makes general sanity and complete adjustment impossible. Training in non-identity plays a therapeutic role with adults.
Alfred Korzybski
God may forgive your sins, but your nervous system won't.
Alfred Korzybski
Whatever you might say the object is, well it is not.
Alfred Korzybski
Thus, we see that one of the obvious origins of human disagreement lies in the use of noises for words.
Alfred Korzybski
The map is not the territory.
Alfred Korzybski
If a psychiatric and scientific inquiry were to be made upon our rulers, mankind would be appalled at the disclosures.
Alfred Korzybski
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
Whatever you may say something is, it is not!
Alfred Korzybski
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
What we call progress consists in coordinating ideas with realities.
Alfred Korzybski
To regard human beings as tools - as instruments - for the use of other human beings is not only unscientific but it is repugnant, stupid and short sighted. Tools are made by man but have not the autonomy of their maker - they have not man's time-binding capacity for initiation, for self-direction, and self-improvement.
Alfred Korzybski
Whatever you say it is, is simply what YOU SAY it is.
Alfred Korzybski
Words don't mean, people mean.
Alfred Korzybski
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
