Alfred Korzybski said this quote

“ What is history? What is its significance for humanity? Dr. J. H. Robinson gives us a precise answer: Man's abject dependence on the past gives rise to the continuity of history. Our convictions, opinions, prejudices, intellectual tastes; our knowledge, our methods of learning and of applying for information we owe, with slight exceptions, to the past-often to the remote past. History is an expansion of memory, and like memory it alone can explain the present and in this lies its most unmistakable value. ”

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The map is not the territory.

~ Alfred Korzybski

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

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

~ Alfred Korzybski

Those ignorant masters of our destinies who regard humans as animals or as monstrous hybrids of natural and supernatural must be dethroned by scientific education.Humans can be literally poisoned by false ideas and false teachings. Many people have a just horror at the thought of putting poison into tea or coffee, but seem unable to realize that, when they teach false ideas and false doctrines, they are poisoning the time-binding capacity of their fellow men and women. One has to stop and think!

~ Alfred Korzybski