AK
Alfred Korzybski
87quotes
Quotes by Alfred Korzybski
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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”
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The present non-aristotelian system is based on fundamental negative premises; namely, the complete denial of ‘identity.’
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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.
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Indeed neither life nor science bothers about “essences”-they leave “essences” to metaphysics, which is neither life nor science.
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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.
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