Quotes About Classification

In fact, classification, the separating of things into classes or kinds, underlies our speech, our capacity to speak. According to Socrates, "conversing" ( to dialegesthai ) was given its name from the practice of those who come together to deliberate in common by separating ( to dialegein ) matters according to their kinds.

What if our love is like a new species, something with no classification yet? What if what we have together doesn't fit neatly into any labeled drawer? That doesn't mean it isn't real.

Science cannot describe individuals, but only types. If human societies cannot be classified, they must remain inaccessible to scientific description.

You guys line up alphabetically by height.

Less than eight years makes you a Puma. Over eight years makes you a Cougar,

Reviewing the history of official racial classifications reminds us that these categories are not natural—and neither are the institutional inequities that race undergirds.

A nominal scale has no implied order or magnitude—like gender or location or whether a system has a given feature.

In the same way, consider bungalow versus house versus building . . . starlet versus girl versus female . . . Colt versus revolver versus firearm . . . steak versus meat versus food.

Kriegsentscheidend, or Decisive for the War. Most top-secret German weapons, including the V rockets, were merely classified Kriegswichtig

The boundaries between fear and other emotions are not clear-cut. How does fear differ from dread, consternation or surprise? Anger, disgust, hatred and horror all contain elements of fear. Jealousy may be understood as fear of losing one's partner; guilt may be fear of God's punishment; shame may be fear of humiliation. I history of fear would be rendered meaningless if all negative emotional states were classified as 'really' being fear states.

At the commencements I attended, graduates were classified by their academic rankings. Outstanding academic performance was noted in the programs and awarded with special honors.

Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic.

We class schools, you see, into four grades: Leading School, First-rate School, Good School, and School. Frankly, said Mr Levy, School is pretty bad...

and beware of trying to classify people too   definitely into types; you will find that all through their youth   they will persist annoyingly in jumping from class to class, and   by pasting a supercilious label on every one you meet you are   merely packing a Jack-in-the-box that will spring up and leer at   you when you begin to come into really antagonistic contact with   the world. 

Los clasificadores de cosas, que son aquellos hombres de ciencia cuya ciencia consiste sólo en clasificar, ignoran, en general, que lo clasificable es infinito y por lo tanto no se puede clasificar. Pero en lo que consiste mi pasmo es en que ignoren la existencia de clasificables desconocidos, cosas del alma y de la conciencia que se encuentran en los intersticios del conocimiento.

Sometimes Mrs. Turpin occupied herself at night naming the classes of people.

We put limitations on the way that we think about things, on ourselves, think about all the boxes we live in, male or female, you're this age, that age, this is your job, this is not your job, everything is about getting boxed in.

The notion that anything can be invented wholly and that these invented things are classified as 'fiction' and that other writing, presumably not made up, is called 'nonfiction' strikes me as a very arbitrary separation of things.

As a planetary scientist, I don't know what else to call Pluto: It's big and round and thousands of miles wide.

It's fair to say that Wikipedia has spent far more time considering the philosophical ramifications of categorization than Aristotle and Kant ever did.

There has always been a tendency to classify children almost as a distinct species.

Deconstructing the concept of race not only conflicts with people's tendency to classify and build family histories according to common descent but also ignores the work of biologists studying non-human species.

People know a planet when they see one, and I think that's a pretty darn good test, in fact, for planethood.

If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it's a duck!