General Semantics Quotes & Sayings

You are. Before you are whatever you are labeled. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The definition of 'Employment' by an employer, and, that by an employee, are seldom the same. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

What luck! If the theories of Epictetus, Karen Horney (who first talked about the "tyranny of the shoulds"), Alfred Korzybski (the founder of general semantics), and REBT are correct, you almost always bring on your emotional problems by rigidly adopting one of the basic methods of crooked thinking - musturbation. Therefore, if you understand how you upset yourself by slipping into irrational shoulds, oughts, demands, and commands, unconsciously sneaking them into your thinking, you can just about always stop disturbing yourself about anything. — Albert Ellis

For the individual, as I can testify, a brief grounding in semantics, besides making philosophy unreadable, makes unreadable most political speeches, classical economic theory, after-dinner oratory, diplomatic notes, newspaper editorials, treatises on pedagogics and education, expert financial comment, dissertations on money and credit, accounts of debates, and Great Thoughts from Great Thinkers in general. You would be surprised at the amount of time this saves. — Stuart Chase

In general, dividing literature into prose and poetry began with the appearance of prose, for only in prose could such a division be expressed. By its nature, by its essence, art is hierarchical, automatically, and in this hierarchy, poetry stands above prose. If only because poetry is older. Poetry really is a very strange thing, because it belongs to a troglodyte as well as to a snob. It can be produced in the Stone Age and in the most modern salon, whereas prose requires a developed society, a developed structure, certain established classes, if you like. Here you could start reasoning like a Marxist without even being wrong. The poet works from the voice, from the sound. For him, content is not as important as is ordinarily believed. For a poet, there is almost no difference between phonetics and semantics. Therefore, only very rarely does the poet give any thought to who in fact comprises his audience. That is, he does so much more rarely than the prose writer. — Joseph Brodsky

There is absolutely nothing feminine about the colour pink, or, anything bad-luck'ish about the colour black - in itself. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Ambition' is 'greed' rebranded. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Faeces by any other name would smell as gross — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Looking at what 'foreplay' is, 'sexual intercourse' is a game. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

He who says that someone isn't himself is a victim of statistics. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

It is a sign of intellectual maturity to always crawl to conclusions. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Marriage converts a player into a polygamist. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The rich are poor without the poor's acknowledgment of money. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Any proposition containing the word "is" creates a linguistic structural confusion which will eventually give birth to serious fallacies. — Alfred Korzybski