Classification Quotes - Page 3

For no continuity of social act is possible without a corresponding social status and the many different kinds of act required in an industrial state, with its high degree of specialization, make for corresponding classification of status.

Kenneth Burke

Degrees, Different, Kind

Kenneth Burke (1962). “A grammar of motives, and A rhetoric of motives”

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As mineralogy constitutes a part of chemistry, it is clear that this arrangement [of minerals] must derive its principles from chemistry. The most perfect mode of arrangement would certainly be to allow bodies to follow each other according to the order of their electro-chemical properties, from the most electro-negative, oxygen, to the most electro-positive, potassium; and to place every compound body according to its most electro-positive ingredient.

Jons Jacob Berzelius

Science, Oxygen, Order

"An Attempt to Establish a Pure Scientific System of Mineralogy: By the Application of the Electro-Chemical Theory and the Chemical Proportions". Book by Jons Jacob Berzelius, 1814.

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Classification is now a pejorative statement. You know, these classifiers look like "dumb fools." I'm a classifier. But I'd like to use a word that includes more than what people consider is encompassed by classification. It is more than that, and it's something which can be called phenomenology.

William Wilson Morgan

Science, People, Dumb

Interview with David DeVorkin, www.aip.org. August 8, 1978.

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Highly creative people have a gift for connecting supposedly unrelated elements and ideas. They cross borders without regard for customs posts or No Trespassing signs. They throw suspension bridges across great distances. These elegant and unexpected combinations flow together beautifully in the twilight zone, where metaphor and resemblance rules in place of logic and classification.

Robert Moss

Distance, Twilight, Bridges

Robert Moss (2010). “Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination, and Life Beyond Death”, p.158, New World Library

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That the speech of self-disclosure should be translatable seems to me very odd, but I am convinced that it is. The conclusion that I draw is that the only quality which all human being without exception possess is uniqueness: any characteristic, on the other hand, which one individual can be recognized as having in common with another, like red hair or the English language, implies the existence of other individual qualities which this classification excludes.

W. H. Auden

Hair, Self, Hands

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In my opinion the separation of the c- and ac-stars is the most important advancement in stellar classification since the trials by Vogel and Secchi ... To neglect the c-properties in classifying stellar spectra, I think, is nearly the same thing as if a zoologist, who has detected the deciding differences between a whale and a fish, would continue classifying them together.

Ejnar Hertzsprung

Stars, Science, Thinking

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I had the evidence that a crash did happen here....Give this information to the young people of the world and this country....They want it. Give it to them. Don't hide it and tell lies and make stories. They're not stupid....It's their information. It doesn't belong to the Army or the Department of Defence. If it's classified, take the classification off and give it to them!

Philip J. Corso

Country, Military, Lying

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The air of caricature never fails to show itself in the products of reason applied relentlessly and without correction. The observation of clinical facts would seem to be a pursuit of the physician as harmless as it is indispensable. [But] it seemed irresistibly rational to certain minds that diseases should be as fully classifiable as are beetles and butterflies. This doctrine ... bore perhaps its richest fruit in the hands of Boissier de Sauvauges. In his Nosologia Methodica published in 1768 ... this Linnaeus of the bedside grouped diseases into ten classes, 295 genera, and 2400 species.

Wilfred Trotter

Butterfly, Air, Hands

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I would never jeopardize classified information to be brought out to the public. This information is all open source. There is no reason to worry about classification. It is simply an attempt by bureaucrats to cover their rear ends.

Curt Weldon

Worry, Information, Reason

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Western science is a product of the Apollonian mind: its hope is that by naming and classification, by the cold light of intellect, archaic night can be pushed back and defeated.

Camille Paglia

Science, Night, Light

Camille Paglia (2018). “Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism”, p.31, Canongate Books

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The classification of facts and the formation of absolute judgments upon the basis of this classification-judgments independent of the idiosyncrasies of the individual mind-essentially sum up the aim and method of modern science. The scientific man has above all things to strive at self-elimination in his judgments, to provide an argument which is as true for each individual mind as for his own.

Karl Pearson

Independent, Science, Men

Karl Pearson (2007). “The Grammar of Science”, p.6, Cosimo, Inc.

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When every fact, every present or past phenomenon of that universe, every phase of present or past life therein, has been examined, classified, and co-ordinated with the rest, then the mission of science will be completed. What is this but saying that the task of science can never end till man ceases to be, till history is no longer made, and development itself ceases?

Karl Pearson

Science, Men, Past

Karl Pearson (1892). “The Grammar of Science”

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The classification of facts, the recognition of their sequence and relative significance is the function of science, and the habit of forming a judgment upon these facts unbiassed by personal feeling is characteristic of what may be termed the scientific frame of mind.

Karl Pearson

Science, Feelings, Mind

Karl Pearson (2007). “The Grammar of Science”, p.6, Cosimo, Inc.

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One's own free and unfettered volition, one's own caprice, however wild, one's own fancy, inflamed sometimes to the point of madness - that is the one best and greatest good, which is never taken into consideration because it cannot fit into any classification and the omission of which sends all systems and theories to the devil.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Taken, Omission, Devil

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The music defied classification. If I had been writing a review of the show, I would have labeled it progressive, guitar-driven rock ’n’ roll. But the guitars made sounds guitars didn’t always make. Symphonic sounds. Sacred sounds. The music dug in so deep you didn’t hear it so much as feel it, reminding me of a dream I used to have when I was a kid, where I would be standing on a street corner, I would jump into the air, flap my arms, and soar up into the sky. That’s the only way I could describe the music. It was the sonic equivalent of flight.

Tiffanie DeBartolo

Dream, Writing, Kids

Tiffanie DeBartolo (2005). “How to Kill a Rock Star”, p.86, Sourcebooks, Inc.

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Yet Irina had once tucked away, she wasn't sure when or why, that happiness is almost definitionally a condition of which you are not aware at the time. To inhabit your own contentment is to be wholly present, with no orbiting satellite to take clinical readings of the state of the planet. Conventionally, you grow conscious of happiness at the very point that it begins to elude you. When not misused to talk yourself into something - when not a lie - the h-word is a classification applied in retrospect. It is a bracketing assessment, a label only decisively pasted onto an era once it is over.

Lionel Shriver

Lying, Reading, Elude You

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Homicide, /n./ The slaying of one human by another. There are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy, but it makes no great difference to the person slain whether he died by one kind or another - the classification is for the advantage of the lawyers.

Ambrose Bierce

Death, Suicide, Differences

Ambrose Bierce (2001). “The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary”, p.111, University of Georgia Press

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Any classification according to a singular identity polarizes people in a particular way, but if we take note of the fact that we have many different identities - related not just to religion but also to language, occupation and business, politics, class and poverty, and many others - we can see that the polarization of one can be resisted by a fuller picture. So knowledge and understanding are extremely important to fight against singular polarization.

Amartya Sen

Knowledge, Fighting, Class

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Ministry of Magic (M.O.M) Classification. xxxxx Known wizard killer / impossible to train or domesticate / or anything Hagrid likes

J. K. Rowling

Magic, Ministry, Wizards

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My amateur interest in astronomy brought out the term "magnitude," which is used for the brightness of a star.

Charles Richet

Stars, Science, Nomenclature

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Geneticists believe that anthropologists have decided what a race is. Ethnologists assume that their classifications embody principles which genetic science has proved correct. Politicians believe that their prejudices have the sanction of genetic laws and the findings of physical anthropology to sustain them.

Lancelot Hogben

Believe, Law, Race

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God created, Linnaeus ordered.

Sten Lindroth

God, Science, Order

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For more than 50 years, men and women around the world have reported sights in the sky that are strange to their experience and understanding. Inasmuch as many of these sights appeared to be solid objects having impressive performance, they have become known as Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) or, colloquially, flying saucers. Their positive identification is one of the major public scientific challenges of the era, with a significant number of these sights so far defying all reasonable efforts at classification.

Don Berliner

Men, Sight, Years

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Every attempt, by whatever authority, to fix a maximum of productive labor by a given worker in a given time is an unjust restriction upon his freedom and a limitation of his right to make the most of himself in order that he may rise in the scale of the social and economic order in which he lives. The notion that all human beings born into this world enter at birth into a definite social and economic classification, in which classification they must remain permanently through life, is wholly false and fatal to a progressive civilization.

Nicholas Murray Butler

Life, Order, Civilization

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The notion of travelling to far places in order to study alien peoples and cultures, is unique to Western man; it springs from the predatory genius of the Greeks; no primitive peoples have ever come to study us. This is, on the one hand, a disinterested, intellectually inspired impulse. It is one of our glories. But it is, on the other, part and parcel of exploitation. [] The Western obsession with inquiry, with analysis, with the classification of all living forms, is itself a mode of subjugation, of psychological and technical mastery.

George Steiner

Spring, Unique, Men

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