Quotes About Categorization

Taxonomy is described sometimes as a science and sometimes as an art, but really it's a battleground.

It's a surprise that there was much demand, for in fact most varieties of light meat, including veal, chicken, and all other poultry, were helpfully categorized as fish.

I love the way a list makes a big hodgepodge of things simmer down and behave.

Quando um homem pertence a um tipo determinado é porque está morto, condenado. E se ele não pertence a nenhuma das categorias catalogadas, se não é representativo de nenhuma, então tem já metade das qualidades que dele deveremos exigir: libertou-se de si mesmo, detém uma parcela da imortalidade.

In Grossman's mind, there were just three categories of human beings—sheep, sheepdogs, and wolves.

Gr-EEN! YEL-low! OR-ange!" Griffin cries in quick succession. He's just naming random colors—all except the right one. Except, of course, his words aren't really chosen at random. "You notice he always says the name of a color," Arlene points out. "He understands the category.

What the rise of religions did was to give a name to a set of beliefs (atheism) that had always existed but which was considered so unexceptional that it required no special label.

A lot of the time in Ireland we put people into boxes and that's it.

I'm not defining Christians as Jews or Jews as Christians or zebras as elephants.

The world is divided into two categories: failures and unknowns.

This compartmentalized world, this world divided in two, is inhabited by different species.

The sorting we do to ourselves and to one another is at best, unintentional and reflexive; at worst, it's stereotyping that dehumanizes. The paradox is that we all love the ready made filing system. It's so handy when we want to quickly characterize people. But, yet we resent it when we're the ones getting filed away.

We humans have a tendency to define things by what they are not. This is especially true of our emotional experiences.

Jeremy Bentham, the great utilitarian philosopher, once spiked this argument. He said, 'There are two types of people in the world, those who divide people into two types, and those who do not.

The paradox is that we all love the ready-made filing system, so handy when we want to quickly characterize people, but we resent it when we're the ones getting filed away.

The sorting we do to ourselves and to one another is, at best, unintentional and reflexive. At worst, it is stereotyping that dehumanizes. The paradox is that we all love the ready-made filing system, so handy when we want to quickly characterize people, but we resent it when we're the ones getting filed away.

Methinks it would be some advantage to philosophy if men were named merely in the gross, as they are known. It would be necessary only to know the genus and perhaps the race or variety, to know the individual. We are not prepared to believe that every private soldier in a Roman army had a name of his own—because we have not supposed that he had a character of his own.

The American psychologists classified persons on the basis of IQ tests, labeling those judged feebleminded in descending order as morons, imbeciles, or idiots

The world is divided into two sorts of people: those who think the world is divided into two sorts of people and those who don't.

Calling a book 'young adult' is only important in that it can help get a book to the right reader. After that, it's a useless abstraction and should be discarded.

We separate problems with the brain into neurological and psychiatric, and it's because it's stigmatised still. Mental illness is still stigmatised. Imagine if we treated people with cancer like that. Just because your personality changes and your behaviour changes, all of a sudden you are put in a different category.

I had a library of maybe 1,000 books in my room in Buenos Aires. I did have the sense that everything there was organised in the right way. You'll probably think I needed serious psychiatric treatment, but there were times when I would not buy a book because I knew it wouldn't fit one of the categories into which I had divided the library.

I don't know if being stereotyped is good or bad. But, that is the trend industry follows.

It was very important thousands of years ago to categorize things. I can eat that plant, I can't eat that plant. Or this tribe, not that tribe. We don't have to do that anymore - we have processed food now!