Science Quote by Alfred Korzybski

Korzybski skewers the mind’s favorite labor-saving devices: credulity and cynicism. “Believe everything” sounds like innocence, “doubt everything” like sophistication, but he treats them as twins. Each is a shortcut that replaces judgment with a reflex. If you swallow every claim, you never have to test it. If you reject every claim, you never have to test it either. Either way, you’re spared the exhausting middle work: evaluating evidence, weighing probabilities, revising your model of reality when it breaks.

The knife twist is that he frames these stances as “easy” ways to “slice through life,” a phrase that evokes efficiency while implying collateral damage. Cutting through complexity can also mean cutting away nuance, accountability, and empathy. Korzybski, a founder of general semantics, spent his career arguing that humans confuse words with things, maps with territories. In that context, the line reads like a warning against linguistic laziness: total belief and total doubt are both ways of letting slogans do your thinking.

The subtext lands uncannily well in a culture that rewards speed and certainty. Online, “I believe survivors” and “fake news” can function less as commitments than as prepackaged cognitive postures. Korzybski isn’t advocating some mushy middle; he’s defending disciplined skepticism - the kind that can say “I don’t know yet,” then do the work. Thinking, in his view, isn’t a vibe. It’s a practice, and it’s inconvenient by design.