Alfred Korzybski

“ In humanity's manhood, patriotism—the love of country—will not perish—far from it—it will grow to embrace the world, for your country and mine will be the world. Your “state” and mine will be the Human State—a Cooperative Commonwealth of Man—a democracy in fact and not merely in name. It will be a natural organic embodiment of the civilizing energies—the wealth-producing energies—characteristic of the human class of life. ”

“ Ideas have a character of their own—they are right or wrong independently of our hopes and passions and will. In the connection of ideas there is an unbreakable thread of destiny. That is why in his Mathematical Philosophy Professor Keyser has truly said:
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“Mathematics is the study of Fate—not fate in a physical sense, but in the sense of the binding thread that connects thought with thought and conclusions with their premises. Where, then, is our freedom? What do you love? Painting? Poetry? Music? The muses are their fates. Whoso loves them is free. Logic is the muse of Thought.” ”

“ What is the effect upon the progress of knowledge and invention? The effect is stimulation. Each invention leads to new inventions and each discovery to new discoveries; invention breeds invention, science begets science, the children of knowledge produce their kind in larger and larger families; the process goes on from decade to decade, from generation to generation, and the spectacle we behold is that of advancement in scientific knowledge and technological power according to the law and rate of a rapidly increasing geometric progression or logarithmic function. ”

“ It may seem strange but it is true that the time-binding exponential powers, called humans, do not die—their bodies die but their achievements live forever—a permanent source of power. All of our precious possessions—science, acquired by experience, accumulated wealth in all fields of life—are kinetic and potential use-values created and left by by-gone generations; they are humanity's treasures produced mainly in the past, and conserved for our use, by that peculiar function or power of man for the binding of time. ”

“ No one need be told how indispensable it is to have true ideas—just concepts—correct notions—of the things with which we humans have to deal; everyone knows for example, that to mistake solids for surfaces or lines would wreck the science and art of geometry; anyone knows that to confuse fractions with whole numbers would wreck the science and art of arithmetic; everyone knows that to mistake vice for virtue would destroy the foundation of ethics; everyone knows that to mistake a desert mirage for a lake of fresh water does but lure the fainting traveler to dire disappointment or death. ”

“ Normally, thousands of rabbits and guinea pigs are used and killed, in scientific laboratories, for experiments which yield great and tangible benefits to humanity. This war butchered millions of people and ruined the health and lives of tens of millions. Is this climax of the pre-war civilization to be passed unnoticed, except for the poetry and the manuring of the battle fields, that the “poppies blow” stronger and better fed? Or is the death of ten men on the battle field to be of as much worth in knowledge gained as is the life of one rabbit killed for experiment? ”

“ The World War has goaded us into thinking as we never thought before. It has constrained us to think of realities and especially to think of the supreme reality—the reality of Man. That is why the great Catastrophe marks the close of humanity's childhood. The period has been long and the manner of its end is memorable forever—a sudden, flaming, world-wide cataclysmic demonstration of fundamental ignorance—human ignorance of human nature. ”

“ I have called them space-binders because they are distinguished, or marked, by their autonomous power to move about in space, to abandon one place and occupy another and so to appropriate the natural fruits of many localities; the life of animals is thus a life-in-space in a sense evidently not applicable to plants. And now what shall we say of Man? Like the animals, human beings have indeed the power of mobility—the autonomous power to move—the capacity for binding space, and it is obvious that, if they possessed no capacity of higher order, men, women and children would indeed be animals. ”

“ From sands to stars, from the immensity of the universe to the minuteness of the electron, in living things no less than in lifeless ones, science recognizes everywhere the inevitable sequence of cause and effect, the universality of natural processes, the reign of natural law. Man also is a part of Nature, a part of the great mechanism of the universe, and all that he is and does is limited and prescribed by laws of nature. Every human being comes into existence by a process of development, every step of which is determined by antecedent causes.... ”

“ It is nearly eternal as the race of man. Out of that past we have come. Into it we are constantly returning. Meanwhile, it is of the utmost importance to our lives. It contains the roots of all we are, and of all we have of wisdom, of science, of philosophy, of art, of jurisprudence, of customs and institutions. It contains the record or ruins of all the experiments that man has made during a quarter or a half million years in the art of living in this world.” (Keyser, Human Worth of Rigorous Thinking.) ”

“ In an attempt to trace and evaluate the time-binding faculties manifested in the Arts of Engineering, one is at once astonished, and bewildered, at the confusion and contradictions unrealized in the mass of evidence, and how pathetic and deplorable is the sight of hundreds of thousands of workers in the field of engineering toil and creation who unconsciously submit to the degradation, in silent consent, of seeing their marvelous collective achievements chained to space-binding aims. ”

“ This great fact is to be at once the basis, the regulator and guide in the science and art of Human Engineering. Whatever squares with that law of time-binding human energy, is right and makes for human weal; whatever contravenes it, is wrong and makes for human woe.
And so I repeat that the world will have uninterrupted, peaceful progress when and only when the so-called social “sciences”—the life-regulating “sciences” of ethics, law, philosophy, economics, religion, politics, and government—are technologized; when and only when they are made genuinely scientific in spirit and method ”

“ Money is not the wealth of a nation, but production is wealth; so ordered production is the main object for humanity. But to have the maximum of production, it is necessary to have production put on a sound basis. No mere preaching of brotherly love, or class hatred, will produce one single brick for the building of the future temple of human victory—the temple of human civilization. Ordered production demands analysis of basic facts. ”

“ There is none else known to us, and from the engineer's point of view, Edison and the simplest laborer, Smith or Jones, are basically the same; their powers or capacities are exponential, and, though differing in degree, are the same in kind. This may seem optimistic but all engineers are optimists. They deal only with fact and truth. If they make mistakes, if their bridges break down, then, no matter how clever their sophistry, they are adjudged criminal. Like severity must be made the rule and practice toward all those who control the institutions and great affairs of human society. ”

“ Here we have to face the fact that geometrically progressing industry can not live without new markets, which under present conditions have been largely acquired, directly or indirectly, by the power of the army; and this has been the case with Germany. If we curse Germany for being a “military nation” we can, with no less justice, curse her for being a completely “industrialized nation.” If we add to that her nationally selfish and narrow national aim, we will readily understand this “world peach.” ”

“ There is not one fact tending to prove special or separate creation; the evidence, which is overwhelming, is all of it on the other side. The hypothesis of special creation is a mere fossil of the past. Evolution is the only theory which is in harmony with facts and with all branches of science: life is dynamic, not static.
Philosophy, as defined by Fichte, is the “science of sciences.” Its aim was to solve the problems of the world. In the past, when all exact sciences were in their infancy, philosophy had to be purely speculative, with little or no regard to realities. ”

“ Human thought—that unique, subtle and yet most energetic phenomenon of nature—is in the main wantonly wasted, because we do not use, or take pains to use, suitable language; at the same time, false definitions lead to consequences not merely wasteful but positively harmful. When ideas and facts are falsely defined, they tend to bring us to false conclusions, and false conclusions lead us in wrong directions, and life and knowledge greatly suffer in consequence. Our progress is not a well ordered pursuit after truth, as pure chance plays too large a part in it. ”

“ Every sort of human activity—shoeing horses, abdominal surgery, or painting profiles—admits of a peculiar type of excellence. No sort of activity can escape from its own type but within its type it admits of indefinite improvement. For each type there is an ideal—a dream of perfection—an unattainable limit of an endless sequence of potential ameliorations within the type and on its level. The dreams of such unattainable perfections are as countless as the types of excellence to which they respectively belong and they together constitute the familiar world of our human ideals. ”

“ Sound reasoning, once introduced, will overrun humanity as the fields turn green in the spring; it will eliminate the waste of energy in controversies; it will attract all forces toward construction and the exploitation of nature for the common weal.
There are capitalists and capitalists; there are socialists and socialists. Among the capitalists there are those who want wealth—mainly the fruit of dead men's toil—for themselves. Among the socialists there are those—the orthodox socialists—who seek to disperse it. ”

“ If we are to perform the duty of examining them we have first of all to draw them forth, to disengage them from our inherited tangle of beliefs and frame them in suitable words; we have next to bring ourselves to realize vividly and keenly that the conceptions, thus disentangled and framed, are in fact, whether they be true or false, at the very heart of the social philosophy of the world; we have in the third place to detect the fundamental character of the blunder involved in them—to see clearly and coldly wherein they are wrong and why they are ruinous ”

“ I mean the capacity to employ as instruments of increasing power the accumulated achievements of the all-precious lives of the past generations spent in trial and error, trial and success; I mean the capacity of human beings to conduct their lives in the ever increasing light of inherited wisdom; I mean the capacity in virtue of which man is at once the heritor of the by-gone ages and the trustee of posterity. ”

“ To discover the nature of Man and the laws of that nature, marks the summit of human enterprises. For to solve this problem is to open the way to everything which can be of importance to humanity—to human welfare and happiness.
The great problem has been felt as a powerful impulse throughout the ages of human striving, for in all times it has been evident to thinkers that upon the right solution of the problem must forever depend the welfare of mankind. ”

“ And this age-long habit and point of view, which has fashioned his life and controlled his thought, lending its characteristic mark and color to his whole philosophy and art and learning, is still maintained, partly because of its convenience, no doubt, and partly by force of inertia and sheer conservatism, in the very teeth of the strongest probabilities of biological science. Probably no other single hypothesis has less to recommend it, and yet no other so completely dominates the human mind. ”

“ It is thus evident that ideals are not things to gush over or to sigh and sentimentalize about; they are not what would be left if that which is hard in reality were taken away; ideals are themselves the very flint of reality, beautiful no doubt and precious, without which there would be neither dignity nor hope nor light; but their aspect is not sentimental and soft; it is hard, cold, intellectual, logical, austere. Idealization consists in the conception or the intuition of ideals and in the pursuit of them. ”

“ It is obvious that to be able to speak about the great affairs of Man, his spiritual, moral, physical, economic, social or political status, it must first be ascertained what Man is—what is his real nature and what are the basic laws of his nature. If we succeed in finding the laws of human nature, all the rest will be a comparatively easy task—the ethical, social, economic and political status of Man should be in accord with the laws of his nature; then civilization will be a human civilization—a permanent and peaceful one—not before. ”

“ To quote Doctor Jacques Loeb from his Mechanistic Conception of Life: “If on the basis of a serious survey, this question (that all life phenomena can be unequivocally explained in physico-chemical terms—Author) can be answered in the affirmative, our social and ethical life will have to be put on a scientific basis and our rules of conduct must be brought into harmony with the results of scientific biology. Not only is the mechanistic conception of life compatible with ethics, it seems the only conception of life which can lead to an understanding of the source of ethics.” ”