Quote #10

Our rulers: politicians, 'diplomats', bankers, priests of every description, economists, lawyers, etc. and the majority of teachers ... ignorant of modern science, scientific methods, structural linguistic and semantic issues of [today] and ... historical and anthropological background, without which a sane orientation is impossible.... as long as such ignorance of our rulers prevails, no solution of our human problems is possible.

More from Alfred Korzybski

  1. Bankers, priests, lawyers,... politicians, [and news media] constitute one class [of our rulers] and work together. They do not produce any…
  2. There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking.
  3. If a psychiatric and scientific enquiry were to be made upon our rulers, mankind would be appalled at the disclosures.
  4. God may forgive your sins, but your nervous system won't. (Korzybski states that it is not his quote in S&S)
  5. Man's achievements rest upon the use of symbols.... we must consider ourselves as a symbolic, semantic class of life, and those who rule th…
  6. It is amusing to discover, in the twentieth century, that the quarrels between two lovers, two mathematicians, two nations, two economic sy…
  7. The main thesis of this non-Aristotelian system is that as yet we all (with extremely few exceptions) copy animals in our nervous processes…
  8. Any proposition containing the word 'is' creates a linguistical structural confusion which will eventually give birth to serious fallacies.

All Alfred Korzybski quotes