Quotes About Categories

All organisms can make the most basic distinctions--between food and not-food, danger and safety, light and dark, same-species and not-same. But only people can use language to make the highly complex categorizations of, say, animals or physical forces, or however many different kinds of quarks there are now, putting them in separate piles and naming the piles. It's how we proceed; it's how we communicate. Organization into categories is, at bottom, human.

The people who actually make the advances in theoretical physics don't think in these categories that the philosophers and the historians of science subsequently invent for them

How negative eugenics, as it came to be known, emerged as the focus of the movement is, on one hand, complicated, involving many different fields of science and points of view, all occurring within a context of massive social disruptions. But on the other hand, it's not complicated at all. We like having people exist lower on the pecking order than we do. And so the great sorting of humans into categories of deficiency gave eugenicists the perfect target: the abnormals and defectives.

The capital comes at a time of rapid growth and will propel the platform into the mainstream, allowing Builder to open the door for entire categories of companies that could not consider it before.

Business activities and rules are as central to a domain as are the entities involved; any domain will have various categories of concepts.

People become librarians because they know too much. Their knowledge extends beyond mere categories. They cannot be confined to disciplines. They bring order to chaos. They bring wisdom and culture to the masses. Librarians rule. And they will kick the crap out of anyone who says otherwise.

Our urge to avoid eating something that makes us feel sick is often at the root of disordered eating, as we swerve away from whole categories of foods that we imagine would make us feel uneasy.

If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and those who claim to be the bearers of objective immortal truth, then there is nothing more relativistic than Fascist attitudes and activity. From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, we Fascists conclude that we have the right to create our own ideology and to enforce it with all the energy of which we are capable.

There is no quick fix for illegal immigration. But only when we achieve better control of our borders and better respect for our immigration laws can we give meaning to the discussion we need to have over reforming the numbers, categories, and procedures for legal immigration into the United States.

Our judgment and moral categories, our idea of the future, our opinions about the present or about justice, peace, or war, everything, without excluding our rejections of Marxism, is impregnated with Marxism.

Identity and resemblance would then be no more than inevitable illusions - in other words, concepts of reflection which would account for our inveterate habit of thinking difference on the basis of the categories of representation.

Christianity asserts that God made himself human. Those are two different categories - two different levels of worthiness. God is one category, and human is another. That's a downgrade. After that jump, there are no more categories - no more downgrades. There are no human levels of worthiness. There is no hierarchy in God's eyes.

My theory on genre is that while there are people out there who believe that genre tells people what to read, actually I believe that genre exists as a marketing tool to tell you what to avoid.

Most sports enforce age cut-offs—that is, the ages that determine whether you can play another year in your current age bracket as a "senior," or whether you have to move up and be a "freshman" in the next. In

You need a system for capturing hunches, but not necessarily categorizing them, because categories can build barriers between disparate ideas, restrict them to their own conceptual islands. This is one way in which the human history of innovation deviates from the natural history. New ideas do not thrive on archipelagos.

Many of our fiercest controversies involve decisions on how to reconcile fuzzy family resemblance concepts with the classical categories demanded by logic and law.

Our society faces the increasing call to deconstruct its stabilizing traditions to include smaller and smaller numbers of people who do not or will not fit into the categories upon which even our perceptions are based. This is not a good thing. Each person's private trouble cannot be solved by a social revolution, because revolutions are destabilizing and dangerous.

En otras palabras, nuestras mentes son mucho más antiguas que la humanidad. Nuestras categorías son mucho más antiguas que nuestra especie. Nuestra categoría más básica, tan antigua en cierto modo como el propio acto sexual, es la del sexo, masculino y femenino.

Our society faces the increasing call to deconstruct its stabilizing traditions to include smaller and smaller numbers of people who do not or will not fit into the categories upon which even our perceptions are based.

if I was willing to sound cynical - that the only reason that psychiatrists diagnose their clients is so that insurance companies can pay the bills, and I actually believe that that's more true than the claim that the psychiatric diagnostic categories actually capture the essence of the person's problems.

En qué código, en qué escritura, en qué ciencia había aprendido yo que los prejuicios priman sobre las realidades? ¿Por qué era mejor que otros, sino por mis obras? El hombre de talento debe ser como la muerte, que no reconoce categorías. […] Usted sólo tiene un problema sumo, a cuya lado huelgan todos los otros: adquirir dinero para sustentar la modestia decorosamente. El resto viene por añadidura.

All the words in the English language are divided into nine great classes. These classes are called the Parts of Speech. They are Article, Noun, Adjective, Pronoun, Verb, Adverb, Preposition, Conjunction and Interjection.

Es gibt ja keine verrücktere Idee, behauptete Tweedie weiter, als zu glauben, es gebe zwei Kategorien von Frauen: anständige und unanständige.

Romantic love is irrational rather than rational, gratuitous rather than profit-oriented, organic rather than utilitarian, private rather than public. In short, romantic love seems to evade the conventional categories within which capitalism has been conceived.