Classification Quotes

• It is clear that there is no classification of the Universe that is not arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what kind of thing the universe is.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Knowledge, Simple, Arbitrary

  "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins" by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Will Fitzgerald, 1952.

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• A classification is a definition comprising a system of definitions.

  Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

  Definitions

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• All classifications in this world lack sharp boundaries, and all transitions are gradual.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Transition, World, Boundaries

  Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, Anne Applebaum (2007). “The Gulag Archipelago Volume 2: An Experiment in Literary Investigation”, Harper Perennial Modern Classics

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• In my country of South Africa, we struggled for years against the evil system of apartheid that divided human beings, children of the same God, by racial classification and then denied many of them fundamental human rights.

  Desmond Tutu

  Country, Children, Rights

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• Crude classifications and false generalizations are the curse of the organized life.

  H. G. Wells

  Life, History, Curse

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• Science is the systematic classification of experience.

  George Henry Lewes

  Science, Experience, Systematic

  George Henry Lewes (1891). “The Physical Basis of Mind: Being the Second Series of Problems of Life and Mind”

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• I think people are as individual as snowflakes, they kinda look alike but no two are the exactly the same, and all classification is the root of prejudice.

  Craig Ferguson

  Thinking, Two, Roots

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• To be beyond any existing classification has always pleased me.

  Boyd Rice

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• You ask what is the use of classification, arrangement, and systemization? I answer you: order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject - the actual enemy is the unknown.

  Thomas E. Mann

  Order, Enemy, Firsts

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• On those remote pages [of 'a certain Chinese encyclopedia'] it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f ) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Dog, Distance, Flower

  "The Analytical Language of JohnWilkins" (1942) (translation by Ruth L. C. Simms)

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• Natural bodies are divided into three kingdomes of nature: viz. the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms. Minerals grow, Plants grow and live, Animals grow, live, and have feeling.

  Carl Linnaeus

  Nature, Science, Animal

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• The higher the classification of secrecy, the quicker you will report it.

  George P. Shultz

  Secrecy, Higher, Reports

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• The classifications made by philosophers and psychologists are like trying to classify clouds by their shape.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Clouds, Trying, Shapes

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• Should we even have the classification system? Why shouldn't these things be open? There are things you want to keep secret, like the characteristics of your latest fighter plane or something like that.

  Noam Chomsky

  Secret, Want, Fighter

  Interview with Jegan Vincent de Paul, chomsky.info. August 15, 2012.

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• Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive.

  Roland Barthes

  Speech, Language, Forget

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• It is once again the vexing problem of identity within variety; without a solution to this disturbing problem there can be no system, no classification.

  Roman Jakobson

  Identity, Problem, Solutions

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• Perhaps as good a classification as any of the main types is that of the three lusts distinguished by traditional Christianity - the lust of knowledge, the lust of sensation, and the lust of power.

  Irving Babbitt

  Lust, Three, Christianity

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• And then we take a soldier and put murder in his hands and we say to him, "Use it well, use it wisely.

  John Steinbeck

  Hands, Eden, Soldier

  John Steinbeck (2002). “East of Eden”, p.25, Penguin

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• Reality is infinitely diverse, compared with even the subtlest conclusions of abstract thought, and does not allow of clear-cut and sweeping distinctions. Reality resists classification.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Cutting, Reality, Doe

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• Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience co-exist in a state of active interplay.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Block, Moving, Communication

  Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore, Jerome Agel (1996). “The medium is the massage: an inventory of effects”, Hardwired

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• Physics admits of a lovely unification, not just at the level of fundamental forces, but when considering its extent and implications. Classifications like "optics" or "thermodynamics" are just straitjackets, preventing physicists from seeing countless intersections.

  Ted Chiang

  Lovely, Fundamentals, Levels

  Ted Chiang (2016). “Arrival (Stories of Your Life MTI)”, p.52, Vintage

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• Without the discovery of uniformities there can be no concepts, no classifications, no formulations, no principles, no laws; and without these no science can exist.

  Clyde Kluckhohn

  Science, Discovery, Law

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• Ultimately, when you come up with a classification scheme that is collectively exhaustive and mutually exclusive, then the theory can become what Kuhn called a paradigm.

  Clayton Christensen

  Come Up, Theory, Schemes

  Source: www.strategy-business.com

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• I want to go down in history in a chapter marked miscellaneous because the writers could find no other way to categorize me In this world where classification is key I want to erase the straight lines So I can be me

  Staceyann Chin

  Keys, Way, World

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• No occupation is more worthy of an intelligent and enlightened mind, than the study of Nature and natural objects; and whether we labour to investigate the structure and function of the human system, whether we direct our attention to the classification and habits of the animal kingdom, or prosecute our researches in the more pleasing and varied field of vegetable life, we shall constantly find some new object to attract our attention, some fresh beauties to excite our imagination, and some previously undiscovered source of gratification and delight.

  Joseph Paxton

  Nature, Science, Animal

  Sir Joseph Paxton (1838). “A Practical Treatise on the Cultivation of the Dahlia”, p.1

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