Science Quote by Alfred Korzybski

Korzybski’s jab lands because it sounds like a dry scientific observation while smuggling in a pretty devastating accusation: we don’t argue because reality is complicated; we argue because our tools for talking about reality are crude. “Noises” is the key insult. It reduces language - the thing people treat as sacred, patriotic, or self-evidently meaningful - to air pushed through throats. The phrasing punctures the dignity of rhetoric and suggests that much of public conflict is an engineering failure: we built a communication system that’s lossy, then act shocked when the signal degrades into heat.

The intent is corrective, not poetic. Korzybski, father of general semantics, was writing in the early 20th century when propaganda, mass media, and the bureaucratic state were scaling up faster than ordinary people’s ability to parse abstractions. In that context, “disagreement” isn’t just dinner-table bickering; it’s the kind of misunderstanding that can metastasize into policy disaster and war. His broader project argued that words aren’t the things they name (the famous “map is not the territory”), and this line dramatizes the first step in that diagnosis: we confuse sound with substance.

The subtext is a warning against verbal fetishism: treating labels as evidence, slogans as arguments, categories as reality. Korzybski’s cynicism is aimed at our reflex to fight over definitions while ignoring the measurable world those definitions allegedly describe. The line works because it flips blame from bad intentions to bad instruments - and then implies that responsible modern life requires upgrading the instrument.