Categorical Quotes & Sayings

Common-sense knowledge is prompt, categorical, and inexact. — Susanne Katherina Langer

categorical imperative that it is with you. You think first of getting the biggest possible output in the shortest possible time. We think first of human beings and their satisfactions. Changing jobs doesn't make for the biggest output in the fewest days. But most people like it better than doing one kind of job all their lives. If it's a choice between mechanical efficiency and human satisfaction, we choose satisfaction. — Aldous Huxley

God's command 'Go ye, and preach the gospel to every creature' was the categorical imperative. The question of personal safety was wholly irrelevant. — Elisabeth Elliot

we really do acknowledge the validity of the categorical imperative and allow ourselves (while keeping a wary eye on it) only a few exceptions - — Anonymous

This has suggested to some that the very structure of human thought is oppositional-that is to say, rational and associative, rather than linear and categorical. — Marcel Danesi

While the blustery Luther, with his categorical denials of any ambiguity in the Bible, stands as the champion of the humble reader, the reasoning Luther stands within the stream of creeds and scholarship that defines more soberly and narrowly the scope and nature of the Bible's clarity. — Jerry L. Walls

To trace the development of mind from earliest times ... requires ... not a categorical concept, but a functional one ... The most promising operational principle for this purpose is the principle of individuation.[p. 310]" "[yet she also says:] ... we have no physical model of this endless rhythm of individuation and involvement, we do have its image in the world of art, most purely in dance; ... this dialectic of vital continuity ... [p. 355] — Susanne K. Langer

Oh God, my choice of film has never depended on the hero. In fact, you will see that some of my categorical mistakes had nothing to do with the hero in it. — Kajol

It follows, then, that the aesthetic ideal of the categorical agreement with being is a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist. This aesthetic ideal is called kitsch. — Milan Kundera

It took a couple of months before we were both convinced there were no rules about sexual activities in Hell and our spouses were not going to show up out of the blue. It was hard to start a sexual relationship in circumstances of such bizarre uncertainty, especially for an active Mormon and a good Christian, both lost in a Zoroastrian Hell. We were like virgin newlyweds. All my life I'd been raised to believe this kind of thing was wrong. All my life I had lived with a strong sense of morality. How do you give it up? How do you do things you thought you'd never do? Where do all the things you believed go, when all the supporting structure is found to be a myth? How do you know how or on what to take a moral stand, how do you behave when it turns out there are no cosmic rules, no categorical imperatives? It was difficult. So tricky to untangle. — Steven L. Peck

My conscience is informed by reason. It's like Kant's categorical imperative: behave to others as you would wish they behaved to you. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

In contrast to the Kantian, the categorical imperative of the culture industry no longer has anything in common with freedom. It proclaims: you shall conform, without instruction as to what; conform to that which exists anyway as a reflex of its power and omnipresence. The power of the culture industry's ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness. — Theodor W. Adorno

Simple acts are more valuable than extraordinary powers or spiritual gifts. For Jesus there is a categorical difference between charismatic giftedness and the ordinary fruit of love, compassion, and mercy. Perhaps we need to learn to ask ourselves, particularly if we are gifted leaders, if we value our gifts more than love, if we value the performance of a gift for the good of others or the gift of love for the good of others. When Jesus used "fruit" over against mighty charismatic gifts, he was getting at what mattered most. Do you show love to your neighbors, to your enemies, and to all those who happen to be on your path? Jesus is saying here that if you don't do the latter, he doesn't particularly care about your charismatic giftedness. — Scot McKnight

A categorical imperative would be one which represented an action as objectively necessary in itself, without reference to any other purpose. — Immanuel Kant

On the morrow of each conflict I gave the categorical order to confiscate the largest possible number of weapons of every sort and kind. — Benito Mussolini

There is a beauty in paradox when it comes to talking about things of ultimate concern. Paradox works against our tendency to stay superficial in our faith, or to rest on easy answers or categorical thinking. It breaks apart our categories by showing the inadequacy of them and by pointing to a reality larger than us, the reality of gloria, of light, of beyond-the-beyond. I like to call it paradoxology - the glory of paradox, paradox-doxology - which takes us somewhere we wouldn't be capable of going if we thought we had everything all wrapped up, if we thought we had attained full comprehension. The commitment to embracing the paradox and resisting the impulse to categorize people (ourselves included) is one of the ways we follow Jesus into that larger mysterious reality of light and love. — Nanette Sawyer

We very often express in a categorical form a judgment of which we do not feel assured, we even lay stress on its absolute validity. We want to see what opposition it will arouse, and this can be achieved only by stating our assumption not as a tentative suggestion, which no one will consider, but as an irrefutable, all-important truth. The greater the value of the assumption has for us, the more carefully do we conceal any suggestion of its improbability. — Lev Shestov

Living in any other time than the present and living on anyone else's terms but your own is a categorical waste of a human life. — Gregor Collins

Man is the highest essence of man, hence with the categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable essence. — Karl Marx

There are people out there who get annoyed at the story that Djuna barnes, rather than identify as a lesbian, preferred to say that she 'just loved Thelma.' Gertrude Stein reputedly made similar claims, albeit not in those exact terms, about Alice. I get why it's politically maddening, but I've also always thought it a little romantic - the romance of letting an individual experience of desire take precedence over a categorical one. — Maggie Nelson

President Obama's policies have been categorical failures for our country. Unemployment is over nine percent, our deficits are growing, and small businesses are being burdened with regulations. — Timothy Griffin

Education tends to be diagrammatic and categorical, opening up no sluices in the human imagination on the wonder of the beauty of our unique estate in the cosmos. Little wonder that it becomes so easy for our young to regard human hurt casually or to be uninspired by the magic of sensitivity. — Norman Cousins

[Biographical info on Rita]
Born and raised in a Sephardic Jewish family in which culture and love of learning were categorical imperatives, she abandoned religion and embraced atheism. She devoted herself to Science, getting to the point of renouncing marriage for scientific research.
... Unlike other people, Rita Levi Montalcini was a complete human being. — Rita Levi-Montalcini

When neither high purpose nor the categorical imperatives of religion will do, the only argument against suicide is life itself. You pause and attend: the heart beats in your chest; outside, the trees are thick with new leaves, a swallow dips over them, the light moves, people are going about their business. — Al Alvarez

Great poets are all philosophers too profound to systematize their ideas. Inside every dark visionary is a being of insidious reason waiting patiently for his host to die. From the cleft of the creative arises the categorical flower. — Alex Stein

The Human was extremely tall. On its head it had yellowish hair coiled like a rope. It had no hair on its face. And yet his grandmother had been very categorical about that. Humans have hair on their faces. Its called a beard. Its one of the many things that distinguish them from elves. The little elf concentrated, trying to remember, then it came to him.
"You must be a female man," he concluded triumphantly.
"The word is woman, fool," said the human.
"Oh, sorry, sorry, woman-fool, I be more careful, I call right name, woman-fool" ... — Silvana De Mari

Silence, silence.' All the air of the fourteenth floor was sibilant with the categorical imperative. Fifty — Aldous Huxley

I come to the categorical conclusion that precisely at this moment we must give battle to the Black Hundred clergy in the most decisive and merciless manner and crush its resistance with
such brutality that it will not forget it for decades to come. The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in executing for
this reason, the better. — Vladimir Lenin

It's the difference between a categorical "Get up" and a tentative "What about trying to get up?". — Jose Saramago

Early on, I learnt from the Russian intelligentsia that the only meaning of life lies in conscious participation in the making of history. The more I think of that, the more deeply true it seems to be. It follows that one must range oneself actively against everything that diminishes man, and involve oneself in all struggles which tend to liberate and enlarge him. This categorical imperative is by no way lessened by the fact that such an involvement is inevitably soiled by error: it is a worse error merely to live for oneself, caught within traditions which are soiled by inhumanity. — Victor Serge

What I think is coming instead are much more organic ways of organizing information than our current categorization schemes allow, based on two units - the link, which can point to anything, and the tag, which is a way of attaching labels to links. The strategy of tagging - free-form labeling, without regard to categorical constraints - seems like a recipe for disaster, but as the Web has shown us, you can extract a surprising amount of value from big messy data sets. — Clay Shirky

And rivaling the Democratic Peace theory as a categorical factoid about modern conflict prevention is the Golden Arches theory: no two countries with a McDonald's have ever fought in a war. The only unambiguous Big Mac Attack took place in 1999, when NATO briefly bombed Yugoslavia.234 — Steven Pinker

Reality is captured in the categorical nets of Language only at the expense of fatal distortion. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Jews refuse to apply Kant's categorical imperative and be limited by universal rules. We might attempt a definition of a Jew as someone unable to make an objective moral judgement. His arguments will forever vary according to whether the subject is good for Jews or bad for Jews. WMD are bad in gentile hands but good in Jewish ones. Gentile nationalism is bad, devotion to the Jewish cause is good. Equal rights for Jews and non-Jews is good in Europe but bad in Palestine. — Israel Shamir

The candidates' written programme should not be too categorical, since later on adversaries might bring it up against them; in their verbal programme, however, there cannot be too much exaggeration. The most important reforms may be fearlessly promised. At the moment they are made, these exaggerations produce a great effect, and they are not binding for the future. — Gustave Le Bon

Inexperienced in the course of world affairs and incapable of being prepared for all the chances that happen in it, I ask myself only 'Can you also will that your maxim should become a universal law?' Where you cannot it is to be rejected... — Immanuel Kant

Interchanges between the senses are frequent and astonishing: One knows the smell of a low B flat, the sound of green, the taste of the categorical imperative (which is something like veal). No — Oliver Sacks

In Gilead, the narrator's friend's son describes himself not as an atheist but in "state of categorical unbelief." He says, "I don't even believe God doesn't exist, if you see what I mean." I pointed this passage out to Mom and said it closely matched my own views
I just didn't think about religion. — Will Schwalbe

Live and let live was the famous Viennese motto, which today still seems to me to be more humane than all the categorical imperatives, and it maintained itself throughout all classes. — Stefan Zweig

People shouldn't be forced to categorize themselves as "gay," "straight," or "bi." People are just people. Maybe you're mostly attracted to men. Maybe you're mostly attracted to women. Maybe you're attracted to everyone. These are historical claims - not future predictions. If we truly want to expand the scope of human freedom, we should encourage people to date who they want; not just provide more categorical boxes for them to slot themselves into. A man who has mostly dated men should be just as welcome to date women as a woman who's mostly dated men.
So that's why I'm not gay. I hook up with people. I enjoy it. Sometimes they're men, sometimes they're women. I don't see why it needs to be any more complicated than that. — Aaron Swartz

And again, though we cannot prove, we feel, that we are deathless. We perceive that life is not like those dramas so beloved by the people - in which every villain is punished, and every act of virtue meets with its reward; we learn anew every day that the wisdom of the serpent fares better here than the gentleness of the dove, and that any thief can triumph if he steals enough. If mere worldly utility and expediency were the justification of virtue, it would not be wise to be too good. And yet, knowing all this, having it flung into our faces with brutal repetition, we still feel the command to righteousness, we know that we ought to do the inexpedient good. — Will Durant

To identify Woman with Altruism is to guarantee man absolute rights to her devotion; it is to impose on women a categorical must-be. — Simone De Beauvoir

Morality, after all, has nothing to do with selflessness. On the contrary, self-interest is precisely the basis of the categorical imperative. — Frans De Waal

Immanuel Kant's "categorical imperative" says that individual actions are to be judged according to whether we would be pleased if everyone in society took the same action. — Tom Butler-Bowdon

Golden Rule has been rediscovered many times: by the authors of Leviticus and the Mahabharata; by Hillel, Jesus, and Confucius; by the Stoic philosophers of the Roman Empire; by social contract theorists such as Hobbes, Rousseau, and Locke; and by moral philosophers such as Kant in his categorical imperative. — Steven Pinker

After the end of the Second World War it was a categorical imperative for us to declare that we renounced war forever in a central article of the new Constitution. — Kenzaburo Oe

Poetry is an ethic. By ethic I mean a secret code of behavior, a discipline constructed and conducted according to the capabilities of a man who rejects the falsifications of the categorical imperative. — Jean Cocteau

At the end of their first years, there are few people who would have predicted that Truman would be elected in 1948 or that Reagan would get a second term. It's always premature to make some kind of categorical judgment after the first year in office. — Robert Dallek

Lewis famously advocated a metaphysical methodology based on subjecting rival hypotheses to a cost-benefit analysis. Usually there are two kinds of cost associated with accepting a metaphysical thesis. The first is accepting some kind of entity into one's ontology, for example, abstracta, possibilia, or a relation of primitive resemblance. The second is relinquishing some intuitions, for example, the intuition that causes antedate their effects, that dispositions reduce to categorical bases, or that facts about identity over time supervene on facts about instants of time. It is taken for granted that abandoning intuitions should be regarded as a cost rather than a benefit. — James Ladyman

If history reveals any categorical truth, it is that an insufficient taste for evidence regularly brings out the worst in us. Add weapons of mass destruction to this diabolical clockwork, and you have ... a recipe for the fall of civilization. — Sam Harris

Everything that lives, does so under the categorical condition of decisively interfering in the life of someone else ... — Mikhail Bakunin

Nature or Nature's God" is not a statement, but a name, internally divided by tolerated uncertainty. It has the singularity of a proper name, whilst parenthesizing a suspended decision (Pyrrhonian epoche, of which much more in a future post). It designates rigidly, but obscurely, because it points into epistemological darkness - naming a Reality that not only 'has', but epitomizes identity, whilst nevertheless, for 'the sake of argument', eluding categorical identification. Patient in the face (or facelessness) of who or what it is, 'we' emerge from a pact, with one basic term: a preliminary decision is not to be demanded. It thus synthesizes a select language community, fused by the unknown. — Nick Land

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You gotta be categorical. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

To most people any radical change is even more odious than cynicism. The only way between the horns of dilemma is to persist at all costs in the ignorance which permits one to go on doing wrong in the comforting belief that yb doing so one is accomplishing one's duty / one's duty to the company, to the shareholders, to the family, the city, the state, the fatherland, the church. For, of course, poor Hansen's case wasn't in any way unique; on a smaller scale, and therefore with less power to do evil, he was acting like all those civil servants and statesmen and prelates who go through life spreading misery and destruction in the name of their ideals and under orders from their categorical imperatives. — Aldous Huxley

Oh, come off your perch!" said the other man, who wore glasses. "Your premises won't come out in the wash. You wind-jammers who apply bandy-legged theories to concrete categorical syllogisms send logical conclusions skallybootin' into the infinitesimal ragbag. You can't pull my leg with an old sophism with whiskers on it. — O. Henry

There are moments in Life when keeping silent becomes a fault, and speaking an obligation. A civic duty, a moral challenge, a categorical imperative from which we cannot escape. — Oriana Fallaci

intellectual understanding is one of the best versions of the Golden Rule: Listen to others as you would have others listen to you. Precise demonstration of truth is important but not as important as the communal pursuit of it. Put in terms of Kant's categorical imperative, When addressing someone else's ideas, your obligation is to treat them as you believe all human beings ought to treat one another's ideas."
WAYNE C. BOOTH, — Wayne C. Booth

I am the very model of a modern Major-General, I've information vegetable, animal, and mineral, I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical, From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical. — W.S. Gilbert

The measures adopted to restore public order are: First of all, the elimination of the so-called subversive elements ... They were elements of disorder and subversion. On the morrow of each conflict I gave the categorical order to confiscate the largest possible number of weapons of every sort and kind. This confiscation, which continues with the utmost energy, has given satisfactory results. — Benito Mussolini

I am in a state of categorical unbelief. I don't even believe God doesn't exist, if you see what I mean. (Jack Boughton) — Marilynne Robinson

I believe history teaches us a categorical lesson: that once a people are determined to become free, then nothing in the world can stop them reaching their goal. — Desmond Tutu