Classification Quotes - Page 2

• 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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• Rumour has it that the gardens of natural history museums are used for surreptitious burial of those intermediate forms between species which might disturb the orderly classifications of the taxonomist.

  David Lack

  Science, Garden, Museums

  David Lack (1947). “Darwin's Finches”, p.23, CUP Archive

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• The morphological characteristics of plant and animal species form the chief subject of the descriptive natural sciences and are the criteria for their classification. But not until recently has it been recognized that in living organisms, as in the realm of crystals, chemical differences parallel the variation in structure.

  Karl Landsteiner

  Science, Animal, Differences

  Karl Landsteiner (2013). “The Specificity of Serological Reactions”, p.3, Courier Corporation

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• The first step in wisdom is to know the things themselves; this notion consists in having a true idea of the objects; objects are distinguished and known by classifying them methodically and giving them appropriate names. Therefore, classification and name-giving will be the foundation of our science.

  Carl Linnaeus

  Science, Names, Ideas

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• The kitchen clock is more convenient than sidereal time. We must use the popular category, as we do by the Linnæan classification, for convenience, and not as exact and final. Otherwise, we are presently confounded, when the best-settled traits of one race are claimed by some new ethnologist as precisely characteristic of the rival tribe.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Race, Kitchen, Finals

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.2128, Delphi Classics

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• But what is classification but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also the law of the human mind?

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Science, Law, Mind

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.1102, Delphi Classics

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• The ends of scientific classification are best answered, when the objects are formed into groups respecting which a greater number of general propositions can be made, and those propositions more important, than could be made respecting any other groups into which the same things could be distributed. ... A classification thus formed is properly scientific or philosophical, and is commonly called a Natural, in contradistinction to a Technical or Artificial, classification or arrangement.

  John Stuart Mill

  Philosophical, Science, Numbers

  "The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill".

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• Where there is dirt there is system. Dirt is the byproduct of a systematic ordering and classification of matter.

  Mary Douglas

  Systematic, Matter, Dirt

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• We must recognize that beneath the superficial classifications of sex and race the same potentialities exist, recurring generation after generation, only to perish because society has no place for them.

  Margaret Mead

  Sex, Race, Generations

  Margaret Mead (1963). “Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies”

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• When you want to organize knowledge. you will be careful to base the classification upon essential qualities. You will thus derive classes in which the members have the greatest amount of resemblance to one another and the greatest amount of difference from the members of other classes. But suppose that, instead of organizing knowledge, you set out to organize ignorance and prejudice. You will then do precisely the opposite.You will keep the classification vague and flexible, so that it can be made to include just whatever individuals you choose.

  Barrows Dunham

  Ignorance, Class, Differences

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• In arranging the bodies in order of their electrical nature, there is formed an electro-chemical system which, in my opinion, is more fit than any other to give an idea of chemistry.

  Jons Jacob Berzelius

  Order, Ideas, Giving

  "Essai sur le théorie des proportions chimiques" by Jons Jacob Berzelius (1819) translated in Henry M. Leicester and Herbert S. Klickstein "A Source Book in Chemistry 1400-1900" (p. 260), 1952.

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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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• 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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• 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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• The ultimate goal is a comprehensive classification of what is very likely a single language family. The implications of such a classification for the origin and history of our species would, of course, be very great.

  Joseph H. Greenberg

  Goal, Language, Species

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• Things which stimulate my curiosity are pretty far removed from the practical and therefore from classification.

  J. Robert Oppenheimer

  Curiosity, Practicals

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• Sex cannot be understood because nature cannot be understood. Science is a method of logical analysis of nature's operations. It has lessened human anxiety about the cosmos by demonstrating the materiality of nature's forces, and their frequent predictability. But science is always playing catch-up ball. Nature breaks its own rules whenever it wants. Science cannot avert a single thunderbolt. 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

  Sex, Night, Light

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• The three most effective incentives to human action may be ... classified as creed, greed and dread. ... In examining the scientist it is perhaps worth while to examine how far he is moved by these three incentives. I think that, rather peculiarly and rather exceptionally, he is very little moved by dread. ... He is in fact essentially a person who has been taught he must be fearless in his dealing with facts.

  Robert Watson-Watt

  Science, Thinking, Effectiveness

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• Though, probably, no competent geologist would contend that the European classification of strata is applicable to the globe as a whole; yet most, if not all geologists, write as though it were so.

  Herbert Spencer

  Writing, Science, Europe

  "Illustrations of Universal Progress: A Series of Discussions".

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• Turning to the colour-classification methodology: The starting point are the four pure colours red, yellow, green and blue; their in-between shades and scales of brightness result in colour schemes containing 16, 64, 256 and 1,024 shades. More colours would be pointless because it wouldn't be possible to distinguish between them clearly.

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, Blue, Yellow

  Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2009). “Gerhard Richter: writings 1961-2007”, Distributed Art Pub Inc

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• The proposition of an established classification of states as slave states and free states, as insisted on by some, and into northern and southern, as maintained by others, seems to me purely imaginary, and of course the supposed equilibrium of those classes a mere conceit.

  William H. Seward

  Class, Southern, Slave

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• You have to get rid of borders, limits, and classifications; then light comes. We see everything on the screen of our ideas. We must get rid of that screen to be able to see what is behind. X's ideas are limited, that is why he remains on the surface. Y got rid of the limits, so she always goes to the depths. We should always meet people and new subjects with no set frame of mind. We have to live like that even after long acquaintance. We must get rid of every set idea to approach everything and everyone with love.

  B.K.S. Iyengar

  Light, Ideas, Long

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• Using the risk-based approach presented by the ISPE Guide (i.e., system and component level classification) limited qualification activities to verifying and testing critical aspects of direct impact systems and their critical components.

  Robert A. Young

  Impact, Risk, Levels

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• The morning stars sang together. And a person of delicate ear and nice judgment discussed the singing at length, and showed how and wherein one star differed from another, and which was great and which was not. And still the morning stars sang together.

  Thomas William Hodgson Crosland

  Morning, Stars, Nice

  Thomas William Hodgson Crosland (1907). “Little Stories”

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• Embryology furnishes, also, the best measure of true affinities existing between animals.

  Louis Agassiz

  Animal, Affinity

  Louis Agassiz (1859). “An Essay on Classification”, p.129

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