Semantics Quotes

To a blind man, pawn shop and porn shop are one. To an unintelligent man, oversleeping and sleeping over are opposites.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

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

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

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

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he or she has been born -- the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to he accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it be-devils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.

Nothing complements a fast mind better than a slow tongue. And nothing aggravates a slow mind better than a fast tongue.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

He showed the words “chocolate cake” to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. “Guilt” was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of French eaters to the same prompt: “celebration.

An individual cannot be considered entirely sane if he is wholly ignorant of scientific method and structure of nature and so retains primitive semantic reactions.

Alfred Korzybski

Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?