Alfred Korzybski Quotes

And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things.

I'd always been treated like an object, not like a human.

To a newspaperman, a human being is an item with the skin wrapped around it.

Those services which the community will most readily pay for it is most disagreeable to render. You are paid for being something less than a man.

I think that the dehumanization of another person can happen in the matter of an instant.

It's as if all identity has been stolen from them, except their identity as slaves.

In the eyes of empire builders men are not men but instruments.

It is wrong to turn a man (a subject) into a thing (an object). By means of spiritual dialogue, the I-It relationship becomes an I-Thou relationship. God comes and goes in man's soul. And men come and go in each other's souls. Sometimes they come and go in each other's beds, too.

Whatever day Makes man a slave, takes half his worth away.

Leave the poor Some time for self-improvement. Let them not Be forced to grind the bones out of their arms For bread, but have some space to think and feel Like moral and immortal creatures.

What I find to be very bad advice is the snappy little sentence, 'Write what you know.' It is the most tiresome and stupid advice that could possibly be given. If we write simply about what we know we never grow. We don't develop any facility for languages, or an interest in others, or a desire to travel and explore and face experience head-on. We just coil tighter and tighter into our boring little selves. What one should write about is what interests one.

It is his capacity for self-improvement and self-redemption which most distinguishes man from the mere brute.

The faculty of self-help is that which distinguished man from animals; that it is the Godlike element, or holds within itself the Godlike element, of his constitution.

The technology of mass production is inherently violent, ecologically damaging, self-defeating in terms of non-renewable resources, and stultifying for the human person.

Treating a person as a means to an end, and an end moreover which in this case is pleasure, the maximization of pleasure, will always stand in the way of love.

What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.

Forced from home, and all its pleasures, afric coast I left forlorn; to increase a stranger's treasures, o the raging billows borne. Men from England bought and sold me, paid my price in paltry gold; but, though theirs they have enroll'd me, minds are never to be sold.

The travesty of slavery wasn't physical abuse. It was the moral abuse of looking at a human being as if they are an animal.

On this International Day for the Abolition of Slavery let us reaffirm the inherent dignity of all men, women and children. And let us redouble our efforts to build societies in which slavery truly is a term for the history books.

One who is a slaveholder at heart never recognizes a human being in a slave.

To vindicate the sanctity of human life by taking it is an outrage upon reason. The spectacle of a human being dangling at the end of a gallows-rope is a degradation of humanity.

People are not like a business. You can’t buy and sell them like so much property. You can’t lock them up in a vault and expect them to appreciate it.

There are countries where a man is worth nothing; there are others where he is worth less than nothing.

The family uses people, not for what they are, nor for what they are intended to be, but for what it wants them for- its own uses. It thinks of them not as what God has made them, but as the something which it has arranged that they shall be.

When domestic servants are treated as human beings it is not worth while to keep them.