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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

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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
Class
Semantic
Upon
Achievements
Use
Symbolic
Must
Symbols
Men
Achievement
Life
Consider
Rule
Rest

More quotes by Alfred Korzybski

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A person does what he does because he sees the world as he sees it.
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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If a psychiatric and scientific inquiry were to be made upon our rulers, mankind would be appalled at the disclosures.
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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God may forgive your sins, but your nervous system won't.
Alfred Korzybski
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Psycho-galvonic experiments show clearly that every emotion or thought is always connected with some electrical current.
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 only usefulness of a map depends on similarity of structure between the empirical world and the map.
Alfred Korzybski
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Different ‘philosophies’ represent nothing but methods of evaluation, which may lead to empirical mis-evaluation if science and empirical facts are disregarded.
Alfred Korzybski
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Identity is invariably false to facts.
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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To use words to sense reality is like going with a lamp to search for darkness.
Alfred Korzybski
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Whatever you might say the object is, well it is not.
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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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
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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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Thus, we see that one of the obvious origins of human disagreement lies in the use of noises for words.
Alfred Korzybski
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We see what we see because we miss all the finer details.
Alfred Korzybski
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Any object of thought is both 'more than what we think, and different'.
Alfred Korzybski
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It is now no mystery that some quite influential 'philosophers' were 'mentally' ill.
Alfred Korzybski