Classification Quotes

“العيال اللى كانت بتقعد ف أول ديسك وبيتصاحبوا على المدرسين ويفتنوا على أصحابهم، غالبًا لما يكبروا بيبقوا إخوان. والعيال عديمة الموهبة اللي نفسهم يبقوا حاجة بالعافية، بيكبروا ويبقوا ظباط. والعيال اللى كانت بتجيب معاها حلويات مستوردة والمقلمة أم دورين، هم وأصحابهم بيبقوا فلول. والعيال اللى كانت بتقعد معاك ورا تقشّر يوستفاندى وتقزقز لب سوبر وتقلب ريحة الفصل، بيكبروا يبقوا ليبراليين ويطلع ميتين أبوهم علشان علّموا على كل العيال دى وهمّ صغيرين.”
― مصطفى إبراهيم

“In reaction against the age-old slogan, "woman is the weaker vessel," or the still more offensive, "woman is a divine creature," we have, I think, allowed ourselves to drift into asserting that "a woman is as good as a man," without always pausing to think what exactly we mean by that. What, I feel, we ought to mean is something so obvious that it is apt to escape attention altogether, viz: (...) that a woman is just as much an ordinary human being as a man, with the same individual preferences, and with just as much right to the tastes and preferences of an individual. What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Are Women Human? Astute and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society

“We aren't human."

"Yes. We. Are." His voice turns fierce. "I don't give a shit what the something-somethingth council of big important farts decreed, or how the geomests classify things, or any of that. That we're not human is just the lie they tell themselves so they don't have to feel bad about how they treat us.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season

“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? Astute and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society

“Avoid those who seek friends in order to maintain a certain social status or to open doors they would not otherwise be able to approach.”
― Paulo Coelho, Manuscript Found in Accra

“We all behave like Maxwell’s demon. Organisms organize. In everyday experience lies the reason sober physicists across two centuries kept this cartoon fantasy alive. We sort the mail, build sand castles, solve jigsaw puzzles, separate wheat from chaff, rearrange chess pieces, collect stamps, alphabetize books, create symmetry, compose sonnets and sonatas, and put our rooms in order, and all this we do requires no great energy, as long as we can apply intelligence. We propagate structure (not just we humans but we who are alive). We disturb the tendency toward equilibrium. It would be absurd to attempt a thermodynamic accounting for such processes, but it is not absurd to say we are reducing entropy, piece by piece. Bit by bit. The original demon, discerning one molecules at a time, distinguishing fast from slow, and operating his little gateway, is sometimes described as “superintelligent,” but compared to a real organism it is an idiot savant. Not only do living things lessen the disorder in their environments; they are in themselves, their skeletons and their flesh, vesicles and membranes, shells and carapaces, leaves and blossoms, circulatory systems and metabolic pathways - miracles of pattern and structure. It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe.”
― James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

“For there to be harmony and peace, everything must be balanced. And for there to be balance, there must be equality. And where there is equality, there will be justice. And where justice is honored and preserved, there will always be truth. Eliminate the concept of division by class, skills, race, income, and nationality. We are all equals with a common pulse to survive. Every human requires food and water. Every human has a dream and desire to be happy. Every human responds to love, suffering and pain. Every human bleeds the same color and occupies the same world. Let us recognize that we are all part of each other. We are all human. We are all one.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“It's a huge disservice to classify all minds as either closed or open. I find the best minds are closed by openable windows.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“(N)ot everything fits easily into our systems of classification. The world might be, it turns out, too complicated for us to know.”
― Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights

“There were sharks before there were dinosaurs, and the reason sharks are still in the ocean is that nothing is better at being a shark than a shark.”
― Eliot Peper, Bandwidth

“...that when the Platypus was discovered, scientists said it was a paradox. But Pirsig’s point was it was never a paradox or an oddity. It didn’t make sense only to the scientists because they viewed the nature of animals according to their own classification, when nature did not have any.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals

“We classify things for the purpose of doing something to them. Any classification which does not assist manipulation is worse than useless.”
― Randolph Bourne

“Thus, being the only begotten son of method and resolve, Op Oloop was the most perfect of human machines, the most notable object of self-discipline that Buenos Aires had ever seen. When everything in life from the important universal phenomena to one's own trivial, individual failures has been recorded and anotated since puberty, it's fair to say that one's system of classification will have been honed, condensed to their most perfect quintessence. Or else deified into a great, overarching, methodological hierarchy. Method's very greatness, of course, is revealed in its sovereignty over the trivial!”
― Juan Filloy, Op Oloop

“I have it in my mind that classification is a necessary condition of the working of the mental implement but that it is a departure from the objective truth of things, that classification is very serviceable for the practical purposes of life but a very doubtful preliminary to those fine penetrations the philosophical purpose, in its more arrogant moods, demands. All the peculiarities of my way of thinking derive from that.

I submit to you that syllogism is based on classification, that all hard logical reasoning tends to imply and is apt to imply a confidence in the objective reality of classification. Consequently in denying that I deny the absolute validity of logic. Classification and number, which in truth ignore the fine differences of objective realities, have in the past of human thought been imposed upon things. [...] The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it.

It was about this difficulty that the mind of Plato played a little inconclusively all his life. For the most part he tended to regard the idea as the something behind reality, whereas it seems to me that the idea is the more proximate and less perfect thing, the thing by which the mind, by ignoring individual differences, attempts to comprehend an otherwise unmanageable number of unique realities.”
― H. G. Wells

“[pull-quote]I can understand your concern that works on sex crimes class next to works on gays, but this is an accident of classification, in which some topics must appear next to other topics although there may be no relation between them except that they are a subtopic of a larger subject. . . . To even begin to contemplate any intent other than to arrange works on distinct topics on the shelves boggles the mind.[end pull—quote]

The book before you provides an account of an attempt to perform this mind-boggling work.”
― Melissa Adler, Cruising the Library: Perversities in the Organization of Knowledge

“The question is only: Where do we classify this phenomenon? What do we call it, how explain it? That sounds like the pedantic schoolmaster, but we Castalians are schoolmasters, after all; and if I want to classify and find a term for your and our experience, it is not because I wish to destroy its beauty by generalizing it, but because I want to describe and preserve it as distinctly as possible.”
― Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

“[T]he thought was meaningless, an attempt to quantify direct experience.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“...biographies and categories fall along often conflicting trajectories. Lives are twisted, even torn, in the attempt to force the one into th eother. These torques might be petty or grand, but they are a way of understanding the coconstruction of lives and their categories.”
― Geoffrey Bowker; Susan Leigh Starr

“There is no end to the study and classification of [the] different manifest and hidden attributes, forms, and meaning [of things that exist]. In all of this [are things] held from thought and from sight.”
― Zakariya al-Qazwini

“It is widely acknowledged by researchers that the human environmental classification is a tropical forest animal.”
― Steven Magee

“(The Wee Free Men) is a children’s book because… 2 It has a nine-year-old heroine. This is good enough for the industry, which believes that books with children as the main protagonist are de facto books for children. For similar reasons, Moby Dick is very popular among whales.”
― Terry Pratchett

“The new altitude sickness classification scheme has four types: 1. Altitude Hypersensitivity – Above sea level to 4,900 feet. 2. High altitude - 4,900 to 11,500 feet.
3. Very high altitude - 11,500 to 18,000 feet.
4. Extreme altitude - Above 18,000 feet.”
― Steven Magee, Magee’s Disease

“From the philosopher-kings of Plato to the enlightened oligarchies of Aristotle, some of the world's greatest thinkers have strived to categorise society.”
― Greg Hadfield, Class: where do you stand?

“Everybody has a notion of what a desert should look like. Effective definitions of deserts vary according to the background of those doing the defining and the purpose of their enquiry. An artist’s approach to deserts may be different from the stance taken by a scientist although, broadly, the two usually overlap geographically. It may, or may not, be surprising to learn that no universally accepted definition of the term ‘desert’ exists.”
― Nick Middleton, Deserts: A Very Short Introduction

“Mankind's lot, Cartwright observed, hadn't changed much, of late. The Classification system, the elaborate Quizzes, hadn't done most people any good. The unks, the unclassified, remained.”
― Philip K. Dick, Solar Lottery

“Think in hashtags!”
― Steven Magee

“Write in hashtags!”
― Steven Magee

“There is something about sex classification that make different sex reclassification policies seem not just unfair, but contradictory, even paradoxical. Perhaps because sex is thought to be prior to or outside of politics, unearthing its production as a legal classification seems qualitatively different than thinking through the politics of many other sorts of classifications.”
― Paisley Currah, Sex Is as Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity

“The once-undeniable public fact of sex as easily and objectively knowable has lost its authority; the common sense of sex will never be made whole again, if it ever was.”
― Paisley Currah, Sex Is as Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity

“Rahim is a little tricky, but I think of him as Birdman, because he has really big ears that could easily expand to wings if he gets bitten by a radioactive canary. Crazy, I know, but in comics, that kind of thing happens all the time. Anyway, I can always switch him to Sleeping Beauty. He’s not that beautiful, but he is that sleeping”
― Gordon Korman, The Unteachables