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Categorization Quotes

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Categorization Quotes

“They had been talking about astrology, a forbidden science that was not pursued in the cloister. Narcissus had said that astrology was an attempt to arrange and order the many different types of human beings according to their natures and destinies. At this point Goldmund had objected: "You're forever talking of differences - I've finally recognised a pet theory of yours. When you speak of the great difference that is supposed to exist between you and me, for instance, it seems to me that this difference is nothing but your strange determination to establish differences." Narcissus: "Yes. You've hit the nail on the head. That's it: to you, differences are quite unimportant; to me, they are what matters most. I am a scholar by nature; science is my vocation. And science is, to quote your words, nothing but the 'determination to establish differences.' Its essence couldn't be defined more accurately. For us, the men of science, nothing is as important as the establishment of differences; science is the art of differentiation. Discovering in every man that which distinguishes him from others is to know him.”

ScienceIndividualityDifferenceCategorization
Book:Narcissus and Goldmund
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“Our categories are important. We cannot organize a social life, a political movement, or our individual identities and desires without them. The fact that categories invariably leak and can never contain all the relevant "existing things" does not render them useless, only limited. Categories like “woman,” “butch,” “lesbian,” or “transsexual” are all imperfect, historical, temporary, and arbitrary. We use them, and they use us. We use them to construct meaningful lives, and they mold us into historically specific forms of personhood. Instead of fighting for immaculate classifications and impenetrable boundaries, let us strive to maintain a community that understands diversity as a gift, sees anomalies as precious, and treats all basic principles with a hefty dose of skepticism.”

PoliticsHistorySocietyIdentityDiversityLabelsWomanLesbianCategorizationTranssexual
Author:Gayle Rubin
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“There's no evidence from decades of Pew Research surveys that public opinion, in the aggregate, is more extreme now than in the past. But what has changed -- and pretty dramatically -- is the growing tendency of people to sort themselves into political parties based on their ideological differences.”

PoliticsNewsResearchIdeologyVotingPolitical PartiesPublic OpinionSegregationAmerican PoliticsAmerican CultureExtremismPartisansFactionsPublic PolicyAmericansPartisanshipCurrent EventsPolarizationIdeologuesCategorizationCurrent AffairsIdeologiesPolitical BeliefsChanging TimesU S PoliticsVoter BehaviorFactionalismSelf Segregation
Book:The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown
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“Our categories arise from the fact that we are neural beings, from the nature of our bodily capacities, from our experience interacting in the world, and from our evolved capacity for basic-level categorization - a level at which we optimally interact with the world. Evolution has not required us to be as accurate above and below the basic level as at the basic level, and so we are not.”

Human KnowledgeCategorizationConceptualizationLimits Of Knowledge
Book:Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought
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“There are underwater cables that seem to emerge and interweave the various objects drifting and rotating in space. I can imagine their intersections and junction points and synapses ~ the remote hosts out in the fringes. The control stations on terrain that re-route incoming impulses. A flood of light information is passing between domains, all of it insulated within these submerged cables unseen to those on the surface. There is something unsettling about this. Even the sharks seem to steer clear of the cables as though in instinctual protest to the coded impulses passing throughout and beyond, evading the frequencies that comprehensively register and reflexively influence all conceptualization, inclination, and movement.”

SharksInformation TechnologyConnectednessOntologyCategorizationConceptualizationCodesImpulsesRemote HostUnderwater Cable
Book:trenches parallax leapfrog
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“I felt that it was unfair that my lack of a few pounds of flesh should deprive me of a chance at a good job but I had long ago emotionally rejected the world in which I lived and my reaction was: Well, this is the system by which people want the world to run whether it helps them or not. To me, my losing was only another manifestation of that queer, material way of American living that computed everything in terms of the concrete: weight, color, race, fur coats, radios, electric refrigerators, cars, money ... It seemed that I simply could not fit into a materialistic life.”

MaterialismAmerican CultureCategorizationRestrictionsAcquisition Culture
Book:Black Boy
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“New Adult is a label that is condescending to readers and authors alike. It implies that the books act as training wheels between Young Adult and Adult. For the New Adult books that are particularly childish, the label implies that they are a step above Young Adult--which is insulting to the Young Adult books that are far superior. For the New Adult books that are particularly sophisticated, the label implies that they are not worthy of being considered "adult." It's a lose-lose situation for everyone. [...] Therefore, the new genre of New Adult is a large step backwards. It increases the system of categories and labels even further, and prevents readers from expanding their horizons and minds. The term is reductive and it is insulting to its own audience.”

BooksNew AdultCategorizationNew Adult FictionGenresCategorisation
Author:Lauren Sarner
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“The desire to categorize humans along racial lines, and the impulse to superpose attributes such as intelligence (or criminality, creativity, or violence) on those lines, illustrates a general theme concerning genetics and categorization. Like the English novel, or the face, say, the human genome can be lumped and split in a million different ways. But whether to split or lump, to categorize or synthesize, is a choice. ... The narrower the definition of the heritable feature or the trait, the more likely we will find a genetic locus for that trait, and the more likely we will find that the trait will segregate within some human sub-population.”

CategorizationCategorisationGenetic DeterminismRacial Categorisation
Book:The Gene: An Intimate History
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“Nature," instead of representing some pristine category or originary state of being, has taken on an entirely different function ... [it has become nothing more (or less) than an ordering factor--a construct by means of which we attempt to keep technology visible as something separate from our "natural" selves and our everyday lives. In other words, the category "nature," rather than referring to any object or category in the world, is a strategy for maintaining boundaries for political and economic ends, and thus a way of making meaning.”

NatureTechnologyCategorizationTechnology And SocietyStsNature Culture Divide
Author:Allucquère Rosanne Stone
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“Venereal: From Venus, the goddess of love, this word refers to the reality of desire. With the rise of Protestantism and science, the word disease was tacked on in a revealing combination of categorization and moralizing. Which disease? The disease of love.”

RealityDesireDiseaseCombinationGoddessRevealingVenusProtestantismCategorizationMoralizing
Book:The Doubter's Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense
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“I don't think there is a need of the categorization 'woman writing'. I think in some sense writers lost their gender when they walk into the world of words; I believe that writers ought to be able to slip under the skins of both men and women. Only then will the writing and the characters have credibility and strength.”

ThinkingMenWorldNeedsWritingBelieveCharacterAbleLostI BelieveWalksOughtMen And WomenSkinsGenderSlipsCredibilityCategorization
Author:Anita Nair
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“People will less and less need to put an identity on genres, such as "hip hop," "electronica" and so forth. That's what I try to do with Princess Superstar. Why should a musician be limited to only one form or one genre of music? And so, I think the same will hold true for the whole male/female categorization.”

PeopleThinkingNeedsShouldTryingWholeFormIdentityMusicianFemaleMalesHip HopHipsGenreHopsPrincessSuperstarCategorizationGenres Of MusicMale Female
Author:Princess Superstar
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“There's the complex categorization of low warmth/high competence. This is the hostile stereotype of Asian Americans by white America, of Jews in Europe, of Indo-Pakistanis in East Africa, of Lebanese in West Africa, of ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, and of the rich by the poor most everywhere. It's the same low-high derogation: They're cold, greedy, clannish - -but, dang, they're sure good at making money and you should go to one who is a doctor if you're seriously sick.”

IfsShouldAmericaWhitePoorRichColdLowsEuropeDoctorsSickWestComplexesJewEastChineseMaking MoneyWarmthStereotypeGreedyHostileAsianCompetenceIndonesiaAsian AmericanWest AfricaCategorizationLebaneseEast Africa
Author:Robert M. Sapolsky
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“We can't use the word normal anymore because it's sort of come to be politically incorrect, because normal implies a classification, and categorizations, and exclusions, and so forth. So neurotypical is the word that we now have to use for what I call normal behavior. Neurotypical behaviors are those kinds of behaviors within the range of usual human conduct that do not rise to the level of a disorder.”

HumansKindUseLevelsBehaviorNormalRangeDisorderUsualExclusionClassificationCategorization
Author:Darold Treffert
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“Perhaps the greatest charity comes when we are kind to each other, when we don’t judge or categorize someone else, when we simply give each other the benefit of the doubt or remain quiet. Charity is accepting someone’s differences, weaknesses, and shortcomings; having patience with someone who has let us down; or resisting the impulse to become offended when someone doesn’t handle something the way we might have hoped. Charity is refusing to take advantage of another’s weakness and being willing to forgive someone who has hurt us. Charity is expecting the best of each other”

WayGivingKindMightDifferencesHurtAcceptingKindnessDoubtAcceptanceWillingJudgingQuietBenefitsForgivenessWeaknessAdvantagePatienceForgivingCharityDisappointmentHandleImpulseJudgementExpectingOffendedShortcomingsResistingOffenceHaving PatienceBenefit Of The DoubtCategorizationPositive ExpectationsExpecting The Best
Author:Marvin J. Ashton
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“Think of the beginning of the story of the beginning of everything: Adam (without Eve and without divine guidance) names the animals. Continuing his work, we call stupid people bird-brained, cowardly people chickens, fools turkeys. Are these the best names we have to offer? If we can revise the notion of women coming from a rib, can’t we revise our categorizations of the animals that, draped with barbecue sauce, end up as the ribs on our dinner plates — or for that matter, the KFC in our hands?”

PeopleIfsThinkingEndsMatterStoriesHandsNamesAnimalStupidDivineFoolOffersBirdNotionDinnerGuidanceChickensAdamPlatesContinuingTurkeysStupid PeopleSauceCowardlyRibsBarbecueCategorizationDivine GuidanceKfcBarbecue SauceDinner Plates
Author:Jonathan Safran Foer
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“Internal mental experience is not the product of a photographic process. Internal reality is in fact constructed by the brain as it interacts with the environment in the present, in the context of its past experiences and expectancies of the future. At the level of perceptual categorizations, we have reached a land of mental representations quite distant from the layers of the world just inches away from their place inside the skull. This is the reason why each of us experiences a unique way of minding the world. (pp. 166-167)”

WorldWayReasonFactsRealityPastProcessLevelsBrainEnvironmentLandProductsUniqueReason WhyInternalsInchesLayersRepresentationSkullsExpectancyPast ExperiencesCategorization
Book:The Developing Mind, Second Edition: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are
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“Black males who refuse categorization are rare, for the price of visibility in the contemporary world of white supremacy is that black identity be defined in relation to the stereotype whether by embodying it or seeking to be other than it…Negative stereotypes about the nature of black masculinity continue to overdetermine the identities black males are allowed to fashion for themselves.”

WorldBlackWhiteFashionIdentityNegativeRelationMalesSeekingRefuseContemporaryDefinedStereotypeMasculinityWhite SupremacySupremacyVisibilityCategorizationBlack MalesNegative Stereotypes
Book:We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity
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