Quotes About Categorization

We are a rock 'n' roll band. We always were. We have heavy-metal hair so you can see why so many people put us in there with that. They've got no brains these people who categorise you. They are at these award ceremonies – here is an asshole who is taking your money on false pretences and he's getting the award on the unanimous decision of all those cunts who never buy records and get into gigs free (laughs).

To what a degree this loose mode of classing and denominating objects has rendered the vocabulary of mental and moral philosophy unfit for the purposes of accurate thinking, is best known to whoever has most meditated on the present condition of those branches of knowledge.

The second general division of names is into concrete and abstract. A concrete name is a name which stands for a thing; an abstract name is a name which stands for an attribute of a thing.

The distinction, therefore, between general names, and individual or singular names, is fundamental; and may be considered as the first grand division of names.

catalogue raisonné

Humans have this need to name everything, no matter how little that thing may deserve it.

Hypens divide

Furthermore, material remains tell us little about the intangible parts of culture: about marriage and dinner recipes and how the world was categorized. (Anyone who has ever learned a second language knows that different cultures look at the world differently, from what colors and how many of them form the rainbow to who is counted as kin.)

The problem with labels is that they lead to stereotypes and stereotypes lead to generalizations and generalizations lead to assumptions and assumptions lead back to stereotypes.

I mean people just have a way of - y'know they'll review your record in two sentences and put you in this little stupid box that you don't want to be in.

the Afro-American experience, rejecting the false history, spurious logic, and expedient politics that collapse the situations of Afro-Americans, Latino Americans, Asian Americans, and indigenous Americans into a single category. He correctly insists that there is no counterpart for any other descent group to the one-drop or any-known-ancestry rule that, with minor exceptions, has historically identified Afro-Americans.

In the past, I was sometimes put in this women's lit category, and I was never really sure that was the appropriate place for me - although I certainly recognize it can be helpful and correct for other people.

Whenever someone says something to me like 'Oh, another blonde at ESPN,' I would like to crunch the numbers. First, I think we have more brunettes than blondes. And second, there are only three normal hair colors. You're either a redhead, brunette, or blonde. It's really not that complicated.

People have become desperate to reduce everything, including each other, to mindless categories of good and bad, as if the world can be divided into Facebook likes and dislikes.

We are a categorically obsessed culture, where we have to compartmentalize everything in reference to another thing, like, 'What does it sound like? Does it sound like this?'

A lot of people do not like singer-songwriters, and a lot of people who like them do not like hard rock. It's either-or.

I can't tell you what genre Maroon 5 is in. I don't know if they're rock or pop or alternative. I don't know what they are. I have a hard time separating that stuff. I just know what I like when I hear it.

They've always had a hard time categorizing me, it seems, even though most of my stuff is country of one kind or another - usually country spilling over into the old adult-contemporary charts.

Once they put you in like a label category it just haunts you.

Only heroes get stereotyped. As they do the same kind of roles again and again.

If you do not keep on sorting your books, your books unsort themselves

Memory results from a process of continual re-categorization which, by its nature, must be procedural and involve continual motor activity and repeated rehearsal.

The First World became a popular phrase in about the 1970s and '80s. The World Bank then began categorizing countries in different categories, advanced to the least developed.

There are three kinds of people in this world: 1) People who make lists, 2) People who don't make lists, and 3) People who carve tiny Nativity scenes out of pecan hulls. I'm sorry, there isn't really a third category; it's just that a workable list needs a minimum of three items, I feel.