Born in Warsaw, Vistula Country, which was then part of the Russian Empire, Korzybski belonged to an aristocratic Polish family whose members had worked as mathematicians, scientists, and engineers for generations.

After being wounded in a leg and suffering other injuries, he moved to North America in 1916 (first to Canada, then to the United States) to coordinate the shipment of artillery to Russia.

He met Mira Edgerly,[3] a painter of portraits on ivory, shortly after the 1918 Armistice; They married in January 1919; the marriage lasted until his death.

In 1925 and 1926, Korzybski observed psychiatric patients at St. Elizabeth's hospital in D.C. under the supervision of William Alanson White.

[citation needed] He sought to train our awareness of abstracting, using techniques he had derived from his study of mathematics and science.

His system included the promotion of attitudes such as "I don't know; let's see," in order that we may better discover or reflect on its realities as revealed by modern science.

One day, Korzybski was giving a lecture to a group of students, and he interrupted the lesson suddenly in order to retrieve a packet of biscuits, wrapped in white paper, from his briefcase.

His fellow students—there were 38 in all—included young Samuel I. Hayakawa (later to become a Republican member of the U.S. Senate) and Wendell Johnson (founder of the Monster Study).

The science fiction writer A. E. van Vogt based his novel The World of Null-A, published in 1948, on ideas from General Semantics.

On March 8, 1949, fellow science-fiction author L. Ron Hubbard wrote to Heinlein referencing Korzybski as an influence on what would become Dianetics: Well, you didn't specify in your book what actual reformation took place in the society to make supermen.

[10] Korzybski's ideas influenced philosopher Alan Watts and physicist Fritjof Capra who used his phrase "the map is not the territory" in lectures and writings "The Tao of Physics", 35th Anniversary Edition.

The third edition of Science and Sanity states that in World War II the United States Army used Korzybski's system to treat battle fatigue in Europe, under the supervision of Dr. Douglas M. Kelley,[citation needed] who went on to become the psychiatrist in charge of the Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg.