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Categories Quotes

“And the system pretends to go along, to become more supple and resourceful, less dependent on rigid categories. But even as desire tends to specialize, going silky and intimate, the force of converging markets produces an instantaneous capital that shoots across horizons at the speed of light, making for a certain furtive sameness, a planing away of particulars that affects everything from architecture to leisure time to the way people eat and sleep and dream.”

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Book:Underworld
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“...the following parable may be useful. Long ago, when shepherds wanted to see if two herds of sheep were isomorphic, they would look for an explicit isomorphism. In other words, they would line up both herds and try to match each sheep in one herd with a sheep in the other. But one day, along came a shepherd who invented decategorification. She realized one could take each herd and ‘count’ it, setting up an isomorphism between it and some set of ‘numbers’, which were nonsense words like ‘one, two, three, . . . ’ specially designed for this purpose. By comparing the resulting numbers, she could show that two herds were isomorphic without explicitly establishing an isomorphism! In short, by decategorifying the category of finite sets, the set of natural numbers was invented. According to this parable, decategorification started out as a stroke of mathematical genius. Only later did it become a matter of dumb habit, which we are now struggling to overcome by means of categorification.”

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Author:John C. Baez
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“The American Naming Authority, a collective of women studying the effects of names on behavior, decrees that a name should only have one user. The nearly 1 million American users of the name Mary, for example, do not constitute a unified army who might slaughter all users of the name Nancy, as was earlier supposed, but rather a saturation of the Mary Potential Quotient. Simply stated: Too many women with the same name produces widespread mediocrity and fatigue.”

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Book:Notable American Women
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“Classification may very well not be useless, but it is never analysis, no matter how baroquely detailed and comprehensive-seeming its categories. At best, it begs questions. At worst it is presumptuous and totalitarian, replacing understanding with filing. We have all heard papers where categories are the driving force, according to which the way we understand literature (or whatever) is to work out what title fits where, as if literary theory was a giant card-catalog. Even when the last book has been slotted neatly into the last of the holes that were cut to be filled with books, what we have are books in neat piles. Which is not nothing, but neither is it that much.”

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Author:China Miéville
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“Nutmeg." Claudia grabbed the bottle and screwed the cap back on. The story was still filtering through me when a new scent exploded forth. "Orris root," Claudia said, tapping the new bottle on the table. "Am I going too fast for you?" "No," I lied. "Good." Linden blossom. Tonka bean. Benzoin. The smells came at me, little glass missiles fired across the table in rapid succession. "The point is speed and precision," Claudia said. She pushed a stack of papers toward me, the pages divided into rows and columns. "Put each scent in a category. Fresh, floral, woody, spicy, animal, marine, fruity. You need to recognize them instantly, without thinking." The bottles started again, and the world turned into charts and rows, filled with an onslaught of strange names. Litsea cubeba. Frangipani. Neroli. Tagette. Orange broke into pieces, became pettigrain, bergamot, tangerine, mandarin, bitter, sweet, and blood. Pepper was black, green, or pink. Mint was winter, spear, or pepper.”

CategoriesScentsPerfumesAromas
Book:The Scent Keeper
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“By the end of the day, I'd reached the point where I could sense the category of a scent almost before the bottle was open. Fresh was quick and cool, never warm. Floral was soft and seductive, the kind that kept its clothes on, showing only an ankle or a shoulder. Spicy bit your nose, woke you up. Woody sent me to the island so fast I couldn't stop the tears from filling my eyes. I couldn't wait to start combining them, creating something new. Victoria was right- this was a language, my language, and I wanted to write.”

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Book:The Scent Keeper
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“When we see beings as belonging to a particular group, for instance, we start to believe there's something fundamental and biological that unites all the creatures in that group, that there's some invisible essence that makes a dog a dog and a cat a cat. We do the same thing with humans: if we are told that a category is important, we infer that the people in the people in that category share a fundamental essence. We essentially them. And the more a category is emphasized, the more we think its members have a unifying thread.”

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Book:The End of Bias: A Beginning: How We Eliminate Unconscious Bias and Create a More Just World
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“Without reduction and categorization we simply could not survive. And so, when considered in the strictest sense, the point is not to live without categories, rather to first liquify established and malignant categories on order to then to helpful sense categories and interpretations that will open up the cognitive space of putting for interpretation and action.”

PerceptionCategoriesFlexibilityAdaptabilityPhenomenologyCategorisation
Book:Self-Actualization
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“Any dimension or number is a relative category. The number is absolute in its absolute volume, but it has its absolute volume only as a sign. No number is absolute; every number gains meaning in relations and only exists in relationships. Only the infinity is absolute and “contains every number” (potentially), but there is no last number. Infinity, as a manifestation in any of its variations, possibilities, and cycles, cannot be reached because infinity is an absolute potential. It is not possible to reach the last number. If there were the last number, there would be no infinity. Although there can be no infinite regress, there can be infinite “progress.” The idea of the infinite regress is the intellectual construct or attempt to reconstruct the “past conceptually.” In contrast, infinite progress is potential that may actualize up to every actualized point ad infinitum. There is no end to the potential of the Absolute.”

CategoriesDejan StojanovicAbsolutePhilosophy Of Dejan Stojanovic
Book:ABSOLUTE
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“By dismantling the narrow politics of racial identity and selective self-interest, by going beyond 'black' and 'white,' we may construct new values, new institutions and new visions of an America beyond traditional racial categories and racial oppression.”

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Book:Beyond Black and White: Transforming African-American Politics
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“A long time ago, I became aware that many of us have a tendency to lump nature into simplistic categories, such as what we consider beautiful or ugly, important or unimportant. As human a thing as that is to do, I think it often leads us to misunderstand the respective roles of life forms and their interconnectedness.”

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Author:Gary Larson
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“The dominant orthodoxy in development economics was that Third World countries were trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty that could be broken only by massive foreign aid from the more prosperous industrial nations of the world. This was in keeping with a more general vision on the Left that people were essentially divided into three categories - the heartless, the helpless, and wonderful people like themselves, who would rescue the helpless by playing Lady Bountiful with the taxpayers' money.”

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Book:Ever Wonder Why?: and Other Controversial Essays
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“I remember when the Titanic sank in 1912, it was the ship that was supposed to be unsinkable. The only thing it ever did was sink. When it took off from England, all kinds of passengers were aboard - millionaires, celebrities, people of moderate means, and poor folks down in the steerage. But a few hours later when they put the list in the Cunard office in New York, it carried only two categories - lost and saved. Grim tragedy had leveled all distinctions.”

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Author:Vance Havner
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“I would say that most of my books are contemporary realistic fiction... a couple, maybe three, fall into the 'historic fiction' category. Science fiction is not a favorite genre of mine, though I have greatly enjoyed some of the work of Ursula LeGuin. I haven't read much science fiction so I don't know other sci-fi authors.”

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Author:Lois Lowry
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“The fact is, Scripture is filled with divine actions that don't fit our human standards of logic or morality. But they don't need to, because we are the clay and He is the Potter. We need to stop trying to domesticate God or confine Him to tidy categories and compartments that reflect our human sentiments rather than His inexplicable ways.”

WayNeedsTryingHumansFactsActionDivineFitMoralityStandardsLogicFilledScriptureSentimentsCategoriesClayPottersInexplicableStop TryingTidy
Book:Erasing Hell: What God Said about Eternity, and the Things We've Made Up
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“I guess maybe my art can be said to be a protest. I see things a certain way, and as an artist I’m privileged in that arena to protest or say publicly what I’m thinking about. Maybe the strongest work I’ve done is because it was done with indignation. Considering myself as a feminist, I don’t want my work to be a reaction to what male art might be or what art with a capital A would be. I just want it to be art. In a convoluted way, I am protesting- protesting the usual way art is looked at, being shoved into a period or category.”

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Author:Nancy Spero
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“I do not see class as a 'structure', nor even as a 'category', but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships... the notion of class entails the notion of historical relationship. ...And class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs”

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Book:THE MAKING OF THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASS
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