Categorizing Quotes

• Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their categories.

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  People, Boundaries, Categories

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2010). “The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable Fragility"”, p.15, Random House

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• Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside.

  Dorothy Allison

  Race, Class, Needs

  Dorothy Allison (2013). “Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature”, p.25, Open Road Media

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• Normally we divide the external world into that which we consider to be good or valuable, bad or worthless, or neither. Most of the time these discriminations are incorrect or have little meaning. For example, our habitual way of categorizing people as friends, enemies, and strangers depending on how they make us feel is both incorrect and a great obstacle to developing impartial love for all living beings. Rather than holding so tightly to our discriminations of the external world, it would be much more beneficial if we learned to discriminate between valuable and worthless states of mind.

  Geshe Kelsang Gyatso

  People, Mind, Enemy

  Geshe Kelsang Gyatso (2011). “Eight Steps to Happiness: The Buddhist Way of Loving Kindness”, p.127, Tharpa Publications US

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• We are a species that must try to impose and find systems - systems of thought, ways of organizing and categorizing reality.

  Jonah Goldberg

  Reality, Trying, Way

  "Do Liberals Live Under A 'Tyranny Of Cliches'?". "Morning Edition", nhpr.org. May 2, 2012.

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• There are many different ways of categorizing news. It doesn't have to be just war and famine and serious politics.

  Piers Morgan

  War, Different, News

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• When it comes to categorizing people, men and women into a group, it gets to be very dangerous.

  Donald Trump

  Men, People, Groups

  Source: www.washingtonpost.com

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• I'm not comfortable with categorizing my own work, but I don't mind if others talk about it in relation to genre as long as they don't try to hold it up to some genre standard.

  Karin Tidbeck

  Long, Mind, Trying

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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• The whole politically correct movement, if it - if that's what it is, was spawned by liberals. So I try to avoid categorizing myself.

  Nat Hentoff

  Trying, Movement, Politically Correct

  Source: thedailyhatch.org

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• If we respect students abilities to define their own experiences, to generate their own hypotheses, and to discover new ways of categorizing the world, we might not be so quick to evaluate the adequacy of their answers. We might, instead, begin listening to their questions. Out of the questions of students come some of the most creative ideas and discoveries.

  Ellen Langer

  Discovery, Ideas, Creative

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• People are tied together and yet isolated from each other by invisible threads of rhythm and hidden walls of time. Time is... a primary organizer of all activities, a synthesizer and integrator, a way of handling priorities and categorizing experience, a feedback mechanism for how things are going, a measuring rod against which competence, effort, and achievement are judged as well as a special message system revealing how people really feel about each other and whether or not they can get along.

  Edward T. Hall

  Time, Wall, People

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• I think one of the great dangers here is going and categorizing anybody from one religion as a terrorist. That's not true... That would let the terrorists win. That's what they want us to do.

  Michael Bloomberg

  Winning, Thinking, Want

  "Bloomberg Says Interpretation of Constitution Will 'Have to Change' After Boston Bombing" by Jill Colvin, observer.com. April 22, 2013.

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• Joanna points her camera at a section of society unused to having cameras pointed at it. But I don't know about categorising them in terms of class; I'm a bit wary of that. My dad is the son of a shipbuilder.

  Tom Hiddleston

  Dad, Son, Class

  "Tom Hiddleston: 'The dream is to keep surprising yourself'" by Euan Ferguson, www.theguardian.com. February 26, 2011.

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• Only a country that is based upon an extremely primitive religion, which is Christianity, I am a devoted enemy of monotheism in all of its forms, could have come with a categorizing of people as one thing or the other.

  Gore Vidal

  Country, People, Enemy

  "Fresh Air Remembers Writer And Critic Gore Vidal". www.npr.org. August 2, 2012.

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• There were a lot of apocalypses that didn't make it into this assemblage because they didn't suit the world. And defining that world and figuring out what its wobbly borders were was a long-term and exhaustive process. I had all of these different ways of categorizing the apocalypses I had made. I had a period of time where I cut them up.

  Lucy Corin

  Cutting, Long, Different

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The people who invented race, who grouped us together as "black," were inventing and categorizing their ability to do something vicious and wrong.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Race, People, Black

  "Jamaica Kincaid: Does Truth Have a Tone?". Interview with Lauren K. Alleyne, www.guernicamag.com. June 17, 2013.

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• The techniques are all means of dealing with one simple idea: She wrote it. (That is, the "wrong" person--in this case, female--has created the "right" value--i.e., art.)
  Denial of Agency: She didn't write it.
  Pollution of Agency: She shouldn't have written it.
  Double Standard of Content: Yes, but look what she wrote about.
  False Categorizing: She is not really she [an artist] and it is not really it [serious, of the right genre, aesthetically sound, important, etc.] so how could "she" have written "it"?
  Or simply: Neither "she" nor "it" exists (simple exclusion).

  Joanna Russ

  Art, Mean, Writing

  Joanna Russ (1983). “How to Suppress Women's Writing”, p.61, University of Texas Press

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• Say someone tells me their name - that name can turn into a taste or a color and that's how I categorize it in my mind. It's an easy way of categorizing things.

  Ali Banisadr

  Color, Names, Mind

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Voices are like fingerprints, from Cagney to Bogart. They never lost it. My voice is instrumental in categorizing me.

  Sylvester Stallone

  Voice, Lost, Fingerprints

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• The vast majority of fiction is written to markets and to this damnable business we have nowadays of categorizing everything.

  Theodore Sturgeon

  Majority, Fiction, Commerce

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