Quotes About Categorization

To name a thing, one needs to have gathered it, distilled and purified it, attempted to identify it with clarity and precision. One puts a box around the thing and says what's in the box is the thing and what's not is not.

People don't really want to know anything about you. They just want you to fit into their little predetermined slots. They decide what you are in the first two seconds, and they only get nervous or upset if you don't live up to their snap judgments.

Labels don't mean much to me one way or another -- except when they close the minds of potential readers. I'd much rather we do away with genres and simply file everything under fiction. I know it can work -- one of my favourite record stores (Waterloo Music in Austin) simply files everything alphabetically and no one seems to have much problem finding what they're looking for.

Market segmentation s a natural result of the vast differences among people.

Labels like 'Chinese Science Fiction' or 'Western Science Fiction' summarize a vast field of work, all of which are diverse and driven by individual authors, with individual concerns.

It is intellectually dishonest to lump venture investors with hedge fund and buy-out investors.

Hollywood is like a really sad, grown up version of high school where people get labeled as 'cool,' 'not cool,' 'jock,' 'bombshell,' 'quirky'... it's like a caste system. You're either in, or you're out.

This wasn't the first time Asians of different ethnicities had been classified as a single group: at various times before this moment, we'd been lumped together as "Mongoloids," "Orientals," "Asiatics," and a variety of interchangeable slurs related to the color of our skin, the shape of our eyes, and the things we eat (or are alleged to eat).

People lump us into the nu-metal category, and there might be a hint of that stuff, but if you really listen to a nu-metal band and then listen to Slipknot, it's so apples and oranges that it's retarded.

Nobody in France would ever say 'He's a Jewish novelist' or 'She's a black novelist,' even though people do write about those subjects. It would look absurd to a French person to go into a bookstore and see a 'Gay Studies' section.

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

Who was "us" and who was "them" was a matter not of sympathy or disposition but of decree.

By putting your stocks into categories you'll have a better idea of what to expect from them.

That whole week, we started to divide things into those two categories: anything or something. A piece of jewelry bougth at a department store: anything. A piece of jewelry made by hand: something. A dollar: anything. A sand dollar: something. A gift certificate: anything. An IOU for two hours of starwatching: something. A drunk kiss at a party: anything. A sober kiss alone in a park: something.

only carry about a hundred

Remember: blonde, brunette, and redhead are not personality types.

No one who is a friend of Pakistan must say anything that harms its reputation; anyone who dares to ask tough questions or make adverse remarks must be prepared to be categorized as Pakistan's enemy.

Atkins knows two kinds of birds: seagulls and the ones that aren't seagulls.

The capacity for humans to come up with ever-increasingly granular in-group versus out-group demarcations is truly breathtaking.

Measurement and categorization are, of course, fundamental to any scientific endeavor, but the implications of being able to identify psychopaths are as much practical as academic. To put it simply, if we can't spot them, we are doomed to be their victims, both as individuals and as a society.

I kind of have a Victorian sensibility - I don't understand stuff until I can classify it and name it.

Thank God you know what labels to affix to people. It would be so inconvenient to have to judge them individually.

Some areas of life are not meant to overlap.

Letters having the same single digit root [1-10-100], [2-20-200], [3-30-300], etc.) are grouped together in nine chambers.