87 Quotes by Alfred Korzybski

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

Until Einstein (roughly), THE universe of Newton was, for us, THE universe. With Einstein, it became A universe. Something similar happen to man. A new 'man' was produced, just as good, certainly contraditory to the old one. THE man became A man, otherwise a 'conceptual construction', one among the infinity of possible ones.

Both ignorance and the old metaphysics tend to produce these undesirable nervous effects of reversed order and so non-survival evaluation. If we use the nervous ystem in a way which is against its survival structure, we must expect non-survival. Human history is short, but already we have astonishing records of extinction.

to treat a human being as an animal - as a mere space-binder - because humans have certain animal propensities, is an error of the same type and grossness as to treat a cube as a surface because it has surface properties.

The reader must be reminded that it takes a good 'mind' to be 'insane'. Morons, imbeciles, and idiots are 'mentally' deficient, but could not be insane.

If those who know why and how neglect to act, those who do not know will act, and the world will continue to flounder.

The map is not the territory.

Law was always made by the few and in general for the purpose of preserving the "existing order," or for the reestablishment of the old order and the punishment of the offenders against it.

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.