Quotes About Categorization

All people are born alike — except Republicans and Democrats.

It'll always be easier to fight others if you reduce them to a single word or look at them just one way.

The human animal differs from the lesser primates in his passion for lists of "Ten Best".

Names are not the things they name. Classes are not coextensive with subclasses.

Once a label (professor, housewife, chair, butterfly, automobile, laxative) has been applied, people are less likely to notice the actual qualities or attributes of what is being labeled.

We all know we are unique individuals, but we tend to see others as representatives of groups.

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

Broadly speaking, nervous women may be divided into two classes - those who are really nervous, and those who imagine themselves to be so.

The category "Women Poets" is bizarre and irrelevant. It's a subcategory of Poets, but there is not a "Men Poets" category.

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

The problem we have is that, some people call it 'too rock' to play on a jazz station, and it's 'too jazz' to play on a rock station. So it's difficult. It's difficult to make it playing this kind of music.

Some social scientists say that in-group/out-group biases are hard-wired into the human brain. Even without overt prejudice, it is cognitively convenient for people to sort items into categories and respond based on what is usually associated with those categories: a form of statistical discrimination, playing the odds.

Rather than simply ignoring contradictory information, we often examine it particularly closely. The end product of this intense scrutiny is that the contradictory information is either considered too flawed to be relevant, or is redefined into a less damaging category.

First I was a European-style player, then I was a downtown 'noise guy,' and now some people call me an Americana guy.

Any adjective you put before the noun 'writer' is going to be limiting in some way. Whether it's feminist writer, Jewish writer, Russian writer, or whatever.

I just think it's patently absurd for scientists to categorize objects on the basis of the numbers of objects that they can remember.

Objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories: those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost.

To define, however, is simply to bound, to separate, or distinguish; so that the thing defined may be discriminated from all other things.

We have three baskets: in, out, and too tough. … We have to have a special insight, or we'll put it in the "too tough" basket.

And concepts are crucial to cognition: cognitive scientists point out that they help us to categorize, learn, remember, infer, explain, problem-solve, generalize, analogize. Correspondingly, the lack of appropriate concepts can hinder learning, interfere with memory, block inferences, obstruct explanation, and perpetuate problems.

Even now, as Special Guest Star, even here, in your own neighborhood. Two words that define you, flatten you, trap you and keep you here. Who you are. All you are. Your most salient feature, overshadowing any other feature about you, making irrelevant any other characteristic. Both necessary and sufficient for a complete definition of your identity:

Man is the only critter who feels the need to label things as flowers or weeds.

Language is made up of names of comparable objects, and that which cannot be compared has no name.

Furthermore, once we have a category, we often stop looking outside of the categories for meaning, as our formal system of carrots and sticks exists solely within the categories