Categories Quotes - Page 4

I am much more open about categories of gender, and my feminism has been about women's safety from violence, increased literacy, decreased poverty and more equality.

Judith Butler

Safety, Feminism, Poverty

Udi Aloni, Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou, Judith Butler (2011). “What Does a Jew Want?: On Binationalism and Other Specters”, p.205, Columbia University Press

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There are no different categories of love. There isn't one kind of love between a mother and child, another between lovers, and another between friends. The love that is real is the love that lies at the heart of all relationships. That is the love of God and it doesn't change with form or circumstance.

Marianne Williamson

Love, God, Mother

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Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive. In the middle category, however - that of the unnecessary but undestructive, that of comfort, luxury, exuberance, etc

Ursula K. Le Guin

Happiness, Luxury, Justice

Ursula K. Le Guin (2016). “The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin”, p.292, Simon and Schuster

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Because You have called me here not to wear a label by which I can recognize myself and place myself in some kind of a category. You do not want me to be thinking about what I am, but about what You are. Or rather, You do not even want me to be thinking about anything much: for You would raise me above the level of thought. And if I am always trying to figure out what I am and where I am and why I am, how will that work be done?

Thomas Merton

Wisdom, Thinking, Always Trying

Thomas Merton (1998). “The seven storey mountain”, Harcourt

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In life our first job is this, to divide and distinguish things into two categories: externals I cannot control, but the choices I make with regard to them I do control. Where will I find good and bad? In me, in my choices.

Epictetus

Jobs, Two, Choices

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An Albanian’s house is the dwelling of God and the guest.’ Of God and the guest, you see. So before it is the house of its master, it is the house of one’s guest. The guest, in an Albanian’s life, represents the supreme ethical category, more important than blood relations. One may pardon the man who spills the blood of one’s father or of one’s son, but never the blood of a guest.

Ismail Kadaré

Father, Son, Men

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I don’t believe in categories of any kind, and when you speak of problems between blacks and whites in the U.S.A. you are referring to categories again.

Duke Ellington

Believe, Kind, Problem

Duke Ellington (1973). “Music is my mistress”, Doubleday Books

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Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which the Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and an access to reality. Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.

Michel Foucault

Believe, Reality, Law

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Women with body image or eating disorders are not a special category; [they’re] just more extreme in their response to a culture that emphasizes thinness and impossible standards of appearance for women instead of individuality and health.

Gloria Steinem

Individuality, Special, Eating Disorder

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The only thing I could think of - because I really don't like categories - but the only thing I could think of is inspirational, and I think music that is from the heart falls right into that category.

Prince

Fall, Heart, Thinking

"Musician Prince Dies at Age 57". "CNN Newsroom", www.cnn.com. April 21, 2016.

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Certain mystes aver that the real world has been constructed by the human mind, since our ways are governed by the artificial categories into which we place essentially undifferentiated things, things weaker than our words for them. We believe we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges.

Gene Wolfe

Real, Believe, Mind

"The Shadow of the Torturer". Book by Gene Wolfe, 1980.

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Artistic truth is for me literally the highest truth: art may seize the essence of persons and movements no less truly, and certainly far more vitally, than a scientific generalization unifies a chaos of phenomena. Time and Space are only the conditions through which spiritual facts struggle. Hence I have here and there permitted myself liberties with these categories.

Israel Zangwill

Spiritual, Art, Struggle

Israel Zangwill (1898). “Dreamers of the Ghetto”

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Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.

Susan Sontag

Art, Criticism, Dubious

Susan Sontag (1983). “A Susan Sontag reader”, Vintage

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Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separated pigeonholes.

Alfred Kinsey

Lgbt Pride, Lgbt Community, Mind

Sexual Behavior in the Human Male ch. 21 (1948)

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How ironical that it is by means of speech that man can degrade himself below the level of dumb creation -- for a chatterbox is truly of a lower category than a dumb creature.

Soren Kierkegaard

Mean, Men, Dumb

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Airline food is not intended for human consumption. It's intended as a form of in-flight entertainment, wherein the object is to guess what it is, starting with broad categories such as "mineral" and "linoleum."

Dave Barry

Funny, Humorous, Food

Dave Barry (2010). “Dave Barry's Only Travel Guide You'll Ever Need”, p.39, Ballantine Books

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You wonder if God doesn't have an answering machine to screen out the prayers of the venal and the boring? And in which category has he placed you?

Tom Robbins

God, Prayer, Humorous

Tom Robbins (2010). “Half Asleep In Frog Pyjamas”, p.48, Random House

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Outside speech, the association that is made in the memory between words having something in common creates different groups, series, families, within which very diverse relations obtain but belonging to a single category: these are associative relations.

Ferdinand de Saussure

Memories, Groups, Different

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Genre categories are irrelevant. I dislike them, but I do not have the casting vote.

Tanith Lee

Casting, Vote, Genre

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Sometimes you recognize that there is a category of human experience that has not been identified but everyone knows about it. That is when I find a term to describe it.

Brian Eno

Sometimes, Term, Human Experience

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Both chronic, long-term poverty and downward mobility from the middle class are in the same category of things that America likes not to think about.

Barbara Ehrenreich

Thinking, Class, America

"Tomdispatch Interview: Ehrenreich, The Prey and the Predators". Interview with Tom Engelhardt, www.tomdispatch.com. June 4, 2006.

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There is not many tenors in the male category and that makes me stick out.

Bryan White

Males, Sticks, Tenors

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I had a library of maybe 1,000 books in my room in Buenos Aires. I did have the sense that everything there was organised in the right way. You'll probably think I needed serious psychiatric treatment, but there were times when I would not buy a book because I knew it wouldn't fit one of the categories into which I had divided the library.

Alberto Manguel

Book, Thinking, Library

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Of course, we can distinguish between males and females; we can also, if we choose, distinguish between different age categories; but any more advanced distinction comes close to pedantry, probably a result of boredom. A creature that is bored elaborates distinctions and hierarchies. According to Hutchinson and Rawlins, the development of systems of hierarchical dominance within animal societies does not correspond to any practical necessity, nor to any selective advantage; it simply constitutes a means of combating the crushing boredom of life in the heart of nature.

Michel Houellebecq

Crush, Heart, Mean

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Among the letters my readers write me, there is a certain category which is continuously growing, and which I see as a symptom of the increasing intellectualization of the relationship between readers and literature.

Hermann Hesse

Writing, Literature, Growing

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