Quotes About Categorization

You know how it is with drawers and labels in the music business. They don't want anything to be complicated. They just want it simple, as simple as possible.

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

We somehow want all the 1's to "be attracted to one place", and all the 2's to "be attracted to another place". Or, put a different way, if an image is somehow "closer to being a 1" than to being a 2, we want it to end up in the "1 place" and vice versa.

A lot of people want to put you in a slot. They want to categorize you. So I fought that, because I liked all different kinds of music.

Once a small planet is discovered, astronomers try to determine which category it belongs to. This is like biologists trying to classify a new animal as either being a mammal or reptile.

I think if you put something in a file that says "war poems" or "love poems" that you already restrict the way in which the poem might move.

There's nothing the world loves more than a ready-made description which they can hang on to a man, and so save themselves all trouble in future.

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

Publishers love to compartmentalize, and Second Chance was not an easy novel to define.

The fact that....you categorize everything as either sexist, or racist, or homophobic, whether it is or not, and therefore harmful to you and you just can't take it, is a kind of mania, a delusion, a psychosis that we have been coddling, encouraging people to think that life should be a smooth utopia built only for them and their fragile sensibility.

The western mind makes definitions; it draws lines.

En lugar de juzgar a la gente por sus méritos y defectos individuales, nos concentramos en un par de detalles de información sobre ellos y a continuación los colocamos en una serie de casillas previamente establecidas. Con eso nos ahorramos el esfuerzo de pensar, al precio en muchos casos de cometer una profunda injusticia.

That's why they're placed in UFO magazines—because by and large the very act of buying such a magazine so categorizes the reader.

They called themselves the Munrungs. It meant The People, or The True Human Beings. It's what most people call themselves, to begin with. And then one day the tribe meets some other People or, if it's not been a good day, The Enemy. If only they'd think up a name like Some More True Human Beings, it'd save a lot of trouble later on

Another characteristic of conflicts such as these," he said, gesturing toward the board, "is the propensity to demonize others. One way we do this is by lumping others into lifeless categories—bigoted whites, for example, lazy blacks, crass Americans, arrogant Europeans, violent Arabs, manipulative Jews, and so on. When we do this, we make masses of unknown people into objects and many of them into our enemies.

In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined.

In general, we are lazy as consumers and just want to label people as good guy, bad guy.

Why does everyone need to have a label?

I don't like the intellectual label.

Hollywood likes to label everyone so you're easier to identify.

I don't like to label films with a genre.

People label you the way they know you best.

Never label anything 'Miscellaneous.'

I think growing up, people want to put you in a box and label you quite often, just because it's kind of easier, I guess.