Categorization Quotes

“We are much too much inclined in these days to divide people into permanent categories, forgetting that a category only exists for its special purpose and must be forgotten as soon as that purpose is served.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Are Women Human? Penetrating, Sensible and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society

“I can't blame you for trying to categorize me. It's a human instinct. It's why scientists are, to this day, completely flabbergasted by the duck-billed platypus: it's furry like a mammal, but lays eggs like a bird. It defies conventional classification.
I AM THE PLATYPUS (Coo coo ka-choo)”
― Jeff Garvin, Symptoms of Being Human

“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.”
― Gayle Rubin

“Humans like nothing more than to pigeonhole the events & phenomena that punctuate their lives.”
― China Miéville, Railsea

“We categorize as we do because we have the brains and bodies we have and because we interact in the world as we do.”
― George Lakoff, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought

“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.”
― Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund

“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.”
― Richard Wright, Black Boy

“إلتقطت أذناي العديد من التهم الموجهة لي مثل التطرف والتشدد ثم يعود الذي يصفك بالمتطرف أن يطالبك بعدم التصنيف في الحديث عن أحد !”
― ياسمين ثابت, وثالثهما الموت

“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.”
― Lauren Sarner

“Any number of celebrities are dogged by "gay rumors" because we cannot quite place them into a given category. We act like placing these people in categories will have some impact on our lives, or that creating these categories is our responsibility, when, most of the time, such taxonomy won’t change anything at all.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist

“The uniqueness of every soul is not a theme that our current culture, obsessed with group identities, cares to assert.”
― Dean Koontz, Odd Apocalypse

“The human compulsion to group people and objects together was ingrained in our being since we evolved. We need to group things, group the dangerous and unknown from the 'safe to eat' or the 'it won't eat you' categories. Without the ability to categorise these threats, our ancestors wouldn't have survived.”
― Charlie Caruso, Understanding Y

“To grow interested in any piece of information, we need somewhere to 'put' it, which means some way of connecting it to an issue we already now how to care about.”
― Alain de Botton, The News: A User's Manual

“The Only Group That Can Categorize Everything Is Everybody”
― Clay Shirky

“Respecting differences while gaining insight into our essential connected-ness, we can free ourselves from the impulse to rigidly categorize the world in terms of narrow boundaries and labels.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection

“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.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History

“I don't categorize things merely to simplify my understanding. I'd rather delve into the process of unlearning.”
― Nikhil Sharda

“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.”
― George Lakoff, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought

“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.”
― Pew Research Center, The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown

“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.”
― Allucquère Rosanne Stone

“ʺThey are all the same!ʺ Is the cruelest
gallows humankind ever built. - On Stereotypes and Sweeping
Statements”
― Lamine Pearlheart, To Life from the Shadows

“Vincent was lovely but not, Olivia had decided, a serious person. Since her late teens she had been mentally dividing people into categories: either you're a serious person, she'd long ago decided, or you're not. A difficulty of her current life was that she was no longer sure which category she fell into.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel

“Simply put, the DSM is a highly constructed projection placed on top of particular body-mind experiences in order to label, organize, and make meanings of them from within a specific worldview.”
― Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure

“Humans insist on defining reality by their standards. They are poorly equipped to do so, since they are selectively deaf and blind in one eye. They are beings with an insatiable need to categorize the universe that surrounds them, but demand that the facts reveal a universe suited for human cultivation and exploitation. Things must remain status quo.”
― Nancy A. Collins, Sunglasses After Dark

“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.”
― Ashim Shanker, trenches parallax leapfrog

“We all say "sunrise" and "sunset" despite the fact that we all also know that the sun isn't rising or setting. Language and labels are fluid. So while we need to resist the impulse to put people in boxes, we shouldn’t negate the value of labels, especially where dominant labels too often seem to erase the identities and experiences of the non-dominant.”
― Jamie Arpin-Ricci

“People love walking around with labels attached to them by others or labels they give themselves. They are prisoners of roles they did not choose, punished by systems they did not design, and shaped by forces they cannot name”
― Sov8840

“People love walking around with labels attached to them by others or labels they give themselves. They are prisoners of roles they did not choose, punished by systems they did not design, and shaped by forces they cannot name.”
― Sov8840