Specialization Quotes - Page 3

• But while I accept specialization in the practice, I reject it utterly in the theory of science.

  Claude Bernard

  Practice, Accepting, Theory

  Claude Bernard “Experimental Medicine”, Transaction Publishers

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• In 1600 the specialization of games and pastimes did not extend beyond infancy; after the age of three or four it decreased and disappeared. From then on the child played the same games as the adult, either with other children or with adults. . . . Conversely, adults used to play games which today only children play.

  Philippe Aries

  Children, Games, Play

  Philippe Ariès (1962). “Centuries of childhood: a social history of family life”, Vintage

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• It is an ancient belief, going back to classical antiquity, that specialization of any kind is illiberal in a freeman. A man willing to bury himself in the details of some small endeavor has been considered lost to these larger considerations which must occupy the mind of the ruler.

  Richard M. Weaver

  Men, Mind, Details

  Richard M. Weaver (2013). “Ideas Have Consequences”, p.56, University of Chicago Press

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• contempt for the degradation of specialization and pedantry. Specialization develops only part of a man; a man partially developed is deformed.

  Richard M. Weaver

  Men, Degradation, Contempt

  Richard M. Weaver (2013). “Ideas Have Consequences”, p.56, University of Chicago Press

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• The history of clothing practices provides guidance for fashioning a new ethic that emphasizes quality over quantity, longevity over novelty, and versatility over specialization. With such an ethic, consumers would demand a shift toward more timeless design, away from fast-moving trends. Clothes could become more versatile in terms of what they can be used for, their ability to fit differently shaped bodies and to be altered.

  Juliet B. Schor

  Moving, Practice, Clothes

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• The standardization and specialization of industrialization was being undermined by globalization. When people in Bangladesh could produce things much more cheaply than anybody could produce them in Detroit, we no longer were the world capital of industrialization.

  Grace Lee Boggs

  People, Industrialization, World

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Adam Smith pointed out that there were three things that make us more prosperous, in a general sort of way: freedom to pursue our own self-interest; specialization, which he called division of labor; and freedom of trade.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Self, Division Of Labor, Three

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• All the accoutrements that distinguish us from animal existence were put in place when we had a different kind of mind than we have now. We didn't have a mind that favored role specialization, and male dominance, and anxiety over female sexual activity related to feelings of male ownership. That all came later.

  Terence McKenna

  Animal, Anxiety, Feelings

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• We know the "great men" and a handful of heavily cited papers in our specialization. When there is a historical frame around a paper it's often a caricature that has become canonical.

  Dale Jamieson

  Men, Historical, Paper

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The daily grinding of evolution, as accelerated by technology, churns out more and more complex organisms, with higher rates of energy use, and with increasing specialization. Minds are the ideal way to express complexity, energy density, increasing specialization, expanding diversity -- all in one system. Mindedness is what evolution produces. Mindedness is what technology wants, too.

  Kevin Kelly

  Technology, Diversity, Mind

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• Images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream, and the former unity of life is lost forever. Apprehended in a partial way, reality unfolds in a new generality as a pseudo-world apart, solely as an object of contemplation. The tendency toward the specialization of images-of-the-world finds its highest expression in the world of the autonomous image, where deceit deceives itself. The spectacle in its generality is a concrete inversion of life, and, as such the autonomous movement of non-life.

  Guy Debord

  Reality, Expression, Forever

  Guy Debord (1994). “The Society of the Spectacle”, Zone Books (NY)

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• We think of history as another specialization, like philosophy of language, rather than as something that informs everything we do and think.

  Dale Jamieson

  Philosophy, Thinking, Language

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• We are lucky in the United States to have our liberal arts system. In most countries, if you go to university, you have to decide for all English literature or no literature, all philosophy or no philosophy. But we have a system that is one part general education and one part specialization. If your parents say you've got to major in computer science, you can do that. But you can also take general education courses in the humanities, and usually you have to.

  Martha C. Nussbaum

  Country, Art, Philosophy

  Source: www.neh.gov

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• The greatest cost of the specialization of technological life - and out of which all other damages are birthed - is arguably our separation from the practical and enriching sense of ourselves as embodied beings. When we are alienated from the wisdom of the body, our lives become theoretical and abstract, and we are distanced from the direct, felt sense of living.

  Richard Strozzi-Heckler

  Life, Damage, Cost

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• Literacy, the visual technology, dissolved the tribal magic by means of its stress on fragmentation and specialization and created the individual.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Stress, Mean, Technology

  Marshall McLuhan, Michel Moos (2014). “Media Research: Technology, Art and Communication”, p.124, Routledge

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• The average student emerges at the end of the Ph.D. program, already middle-aged, overspecialized, poorly prepared for the world outside, and almost unemployable except in a narrow area of specialization. Large numbers of students for whom the program is inappropriate are trapped in it, because the Ph.D. has become a union card required for entry into the scientific job market.

  Freeman Dyson

  Jobs, Numbers, Average

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• Specialization breeds biases that ultimately aggregate as international and ideological discord, which, in turn, leads to war.

  R. Buckminster Fuller

  War, Discord, Turns

  R. Buckminster Fuller (1982). “Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking”, p.25, Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller

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• All research in the cultural sciences in an age of specialization, once it is oriented towards a given subject matter through particular settings of problems and has established its methodological principles, will consider the analysis of the data as an end in itself.

  Max Weber

  Data, Age, Research

  Max Weber (2015). “On the Methodology of the Social Sciences”, p.157, Lulu Press, Inc

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• There are divisions between a culinary chef and a dessert chef, also called a pastry chef. There are specializations within the pastry chef field. Some pastry chefs specialize in baking breads, while others are master cake designers. Each field requires an exceptional level of creativity and attention to detail.

  Ron Ben-Israel

  Creativity, Cake, Details

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• If it is to be effective as a tool of thought, a notation must allow convenient expression not only of notions arising directly from a problem, but also of those arising in subsequent analysis, generalization, and specialization.

  Kenneth E. Iverson

  Expression, Analysis, Tools

  "Notation as a Tool of Thought". Cvommunications of the ACM, 23 (8), (pp. 444 - 465), August 1980.

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• Truth and Truthfulness is an ambitious work, and its journeys into history give it a breadth unusual in these days of increased academic specialization. . . . William's book combines real history and fictional constructs to tell a revealing story that makes us reconsider the meaning of familiar concepts.

  Julian Baggini

  Real, Book, Journey

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• It seems that the increased number of scientific workers, their being split up into groups whose studies are limited to a small subject, and over-specialization have brought about a shrinking of intelligence. There is no doubt that the quality of any human group decreases when the number of the individuals composing this group increases beyond certain limits... The best way to increase the intelligence of scientists would be to decrease their number.

  Alexis Carrel

  Science, Men, Numbers

  Alexis Carrel (1939). “Man the Unknown”

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• The facts of paleontology seem to support creation and the flood rather than evolution. For instance, all the major groups of invertebrates appear "suddenly" in the first fossil ferrous strata (Cambrian) of the earth with their distinct specializations indicating that they were all created almost at the same time.

  Enoch

  Support, Groups, Paleontology

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• We develop all our sciences, archeology, cosmology, psychology, we tabulate and classify and cling to our sacred definitions, our divisions, without any attempt to synthesis, without the humility to see that these are only parts of a total knowledge. ... But somehow we ought to be able to keep the idea of the totality of experience and knowledge at the back of our minds even though the front's busy from morning til night with the life cycle of the liver fluke.

  Maureen Duffy

  Morning, Knowledge, Humility

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• Let us admit that most of us writers feel an essential aversion to politics. By taking such a position, however, we accept the perverted principle of specialization, according to which some are paid to write about the horrors of the world and human responsibility and others to deal with those horrors and bear the human responsibility for them.

  Vaclav Havel

  Writing, Responsibility, Principles

  "PEN International saddened by death of Václav Havel". December 19, 2011.

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