Quotes about Categorization

Reductionism is like a kid who argues that whatever does not fit into his toy box is not a toy.

Being general, the categories never address us as individuals. At best our individuality is lost in the generality. At worst, it is contradicted and denied. Such categories force us to lie on their Procrustean bed, and anything about us that doesn't fit they lop off. They trim the picture of our personalities to fit their mass-produced frames.

When it was full, the men pulled it ashore. Then they sat down and sorted the good fish into containers, but threw the bad away.

It was relatively easy, we now realize, to categorize countries and nations. You knew who your enemies were and whom you could count on as collaborators and friends. And even more importantly, you had ready-made scapegoats to take the blame when things were going wrong.

Even after the war, Eugenia, do you still put people into categories the way you were taught to do—rich and poor, socially acceptable and not, black and white?" "I haven't placed them there. Life has." "But people are all the same in God's eyes, don't you think? Or do you believe there will be segregated divisions in heaven like the ones we've created here on earth?

One of the most critical reasons believers experience defeat is because we categorize only a few areas of our lives as Christ's arena.

To define, however, is simply to bound, to separate, or distinguish; so that the thing defined may be discriminated from all other things.

Individuality outruns all classification, yet we insist on classifying every one we meet under some general head.

But people seem to have a great love for names; for to know a great many names, seems to look like knowing a good many things; though I should not be surprised, if there were a great many more names than things in the world.

Theology is but our ideas of truth classified and arranged.

To the first class belong the Gospels and Acts; to the second, the Epistles; to the third, the Revelation.

The younger we are, the more each individual object represents for us the whole class to which it belongs.