Top 40 Alfred Korzybski Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The map is not the territory.”

— Alfred Korzybski

2. “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

3. “Words don’t mean, people mean.”

— Alfred Korzybski

4. “Who rules our symbols, rules us.”

— Alfred Korzybski

5. “What we call progress consists in coordinating ideas with realities.”

— Alfred Korzybski

6. “Identity is invariably false to facts.”

— Alfred Korzybski

7. “God may forgive your sins, but your nervous system won’t.”

— Alfred Korzybski

8. “Whatever you say it is, is simply what YOU SAY it is.”

— Alfred Korzybski

9. “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

10. “Riches I need not, nor man’s empty praise.”

— Alfred Korzybski

11. “A person does what he does because he sees the world as he sees it.”

— Alfred Korzybski

12. “To use words to sense reality is like going with a lamp to search for darkness.”

— Alfred Korzybski

13. “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

14. “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

15. “Whatever you may say something is, it is not!”

— Alfred Korzybski

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

— Alfred Korzybski

17. “He who learns and learns and yet does not know what he knows, is one who plows and plows yet never sows.”

— Alfred Korzybski

18. “We see what we see because we miss all the finer details.”

— Alfred Korzybski

19. “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

20. “It is now no mystery that some quite influential ‘philosophers’ were ‘mentally’ ill.”

— Alfred Korzybski

21. “Identification makes general sanity and complete adjustment impossible. Training in non-identity plays a therapeutic role with adults.”

— Alfred Korzybski

22. “I think therefore I seem to be.”

— Alfred Korzybski

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

— Alfred Korzybski

24. “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

25. “We humans, through old habits, and because of the inherent structure of human knowledge have a tendency to make static, definite, and, in a way, absolutistic one-valued statements. But when we fight absolutism, we quite often establish, instead, some other dogma equally silly and harmful. For instance, an active atheist is psycho-logically as unsound as a rabid theist.”

— Alfred Korzybski

26. “Second order effects, such as belief in belief, makes fanaticism.”

— Alfred Korzybski

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

— Alfred Korzybski

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

— Alfred Korzybski

29. “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.”

— Alfred Korzybski

30. “Different ‘philosophies’ represent nothing but methods of evaluation, which may lead to empirical mis-evaluation if science and empirical facts are disregarded.”

— Alfred Korzybski

31. “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.”

— Alfred Korzybski

32. “Thus, we see that one of the obvious origins of human disagreement lies in the use of noises for words.”

— Alfred Korzybski

33. “The present non-aristotelian system is based on fundamental negative premises; namely, the complete denial of ‘identity.’”

— Alfred Korzybski

34. “Definitions create conditions.”

— Alfred Korzybski

35. “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.”

— Alfred Korzybski

36. “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.”

— Alfred Korzybski

37. “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.”

— Alfred Korzybski

38. “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.”

— Alfred Korzybski

39. “Psycho-galvonic experiments show clearly that every emotion or thought is always connected with some electrical current.”

— Alfred Korzybski

40. “I am the same kind of moron as the rest of you, it’s the method that does the work, for me as well as for you.”

— Alfred Korzybski

41. “An individual cannot be considered entirely sane of he is wholly ignorant of scientific method and structure of nature and so retains primitive semantic reactions.”

— Alfred Korzybski

42. “Mathematics and logic have been proved to be one; a fact from which it seems to follow that mathematics may successfully deal with non-quantitative problems in a much broader sense than was suspected to be possible.”

— Alfred Korzybski

43. “Say wharever you choose about the object, and wharever you might say it is not. Or, in other words: wharever you might say the object is, well it is not.”

— Alfred Korzybski

44. “One would have to say “in the end everything is a gag, etc” because everything is infinitely more than just a gag. The same applies to other “is”-statements such as “Laughter is an instant vacation””

— Alfred Korzybski

45. “Indeed neither life nor science bothers about “essences”-they leave “essences” to metaphysics, which is neither life nor science.”

— Alfred Korzybski

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

— Alfred Korzybski

47. “No reflecting reader can deny that the passing off, on an unsuspecting listener, of noises for words, or symbols, must be classified as a fraud, or that we pass to the other fellow contagious semantic disturbances.”

— Alfred Korzybski