Quotes from Alfred Korzybski

There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking.

Gustavo Solivellas dice: "El mapa no es el territorio" (Alfred Korzybski)

What Is Man?—will be answered by saying that man is a being naturally endowed with time-binding capacity—that a human being is a time-binder—that men, women and children constitute the time-binding class of life.

There are two ways to slide easily through life: Namely, to believe everything, or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking.

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

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

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.

There are two ways to slice easily thorugh life; to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking.

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.

The map is not the territory.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.

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

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.

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

Moreover, 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 evolve the language. In other words, we read unconsciously into the world the structure of the language we use.

Definitions create conditions.

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.

There is every reason why the standards in our civilization are so low, because we have poisoned, in a literal sense of the word, our minds with the physico-chemical effects of wrong ideas.

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.