Science Quote by Alfred Korzybski

Korzybski’s line lands like a slap because it yanks morality out of the clouds and drops it into the body. The sentence is built on a blunt contrast: “God may” (soft, conditional, theological) versus “won’t” (hard, physiological, absolute). Forgiveness is framed as a social-spiritual transaction; the nervous system is framed as an indifferent ledger that keeps perfect receipts. Whatever your beliefs, trauma, chronic stress, addiction, and shame don’t evaporate because you’ve been absolved. They persist as patterns: heightened vigilance, racing heart, compulsive loops, sleep that won’t come. The wit is in the quiet cruelty of the punchline: you can be spiritually cleared and still neurologically sentenced.

The intent is Korzybski at his most characteristic: an engineer of language trying to de-mystify human suffering. As the father of General Semantics, he distrusted the way words let us pretend we’ve “handled” a problem when we’ve only renamed it. Confession, apology, repentance - these are powerful cultural technologies, but they can also become semantic shortcuts: a ritual that substitutes for retraining the organism. The subtext is less anti-religious than anti-magical thinking. Redemption isn’t a memo you file; it’s a rewiring.

Context matters: Korzybski lived through industrial modernity’s nervous breakdowns - world war, mass propaganda, accelerating tempo - and argued that humans were being asked to process more than their inherited circuitry could comfortably bear. In that light, the quote reads like a warning for any era that loves clean moral narratives: accountability doesn’t end at forgiveness. It continues in the slow, unglamorous work of regulation, repair, and new habits.