How To Categorize Quotes & Sayings

In addition to labeling kids who learn differently as problematic, sometimes defective, most schools classify, track, and categorize students from very early ages. As an abundance of research studies confirm, these classifications tend to become self-perpetuating and self-confirming. My interviewees illuminate the ways in which grades, tests, and opportunities to learn are often arbitrary or related to class, race, and gender. In the supposed meritocracy of schooling, these markers and estimations have profound impact, not just structuring how we fit into the learning hierarchy of an individual classroom, but who we are who whom we believe we will become. — Kirsten Olson

In this country, some aristocratic families automatically categorize persons with dark skin, thick lips, and kinky hair as "Barias" [Amharic for slave] ... let it be clear to everybody that I shall soon make these ignoramuses stoop and grind corn! — Mengistu Haile Mariam

You know how they categorize Shakespeare's plays, right? If it ends with a wedding, it's a comedy. And if it ends with a funeral, it's a tragedy. — Robyn Schneider

One of the most critical reasons believers experience defeat is because we categorize only a few areas of our lives as Christ's arena. — Beth Moore

I love comedy. That's what got me into the arts. I don't even know how to categorize myself anymore. — Steve Martin

Articulation! There, by Joe, was MY absolute, if I could be said to have one. At any rate, it is the only thing I can think of about which I ever had, with any frequency at all, the feelings one usually has for one's absolutes. To turn experience into speech - that is, to classify, to categorize, to conceptualize, to grammarize, to syntactify it - is always a betrayal of experience, a falsification of it; but only so betrayed can it be dealt with at all, and only in so dealing with it did I ever feel a man, alive and kicking. — John Barth

Most people say, 'Well, Earl, you sing the blues,' or however they want to categorize it. I just sing songs. — Earl King

Charity is having patience with someone who has let us down. It is resisting the impulse to become offended easily. It is accepting weaknesses and shortcomings. It is accepting people as they truly are. It is looking beyond physical appearances to attributes that will not dim through time. It is resisting the impulse to categorize others. — Thomas S. Monson

Life is funny. Life isn't categorized into comedy, drama, action, is it?So I don't know why they try to categorize everything. It drives me crazy-why it would have to be just a romantic comedy or ... I want to have a little integrity, a little story, you know — Jennifer Aniston

I want to be an artist you cannot categorize at all. You can't put a box around me. You can't put anything around me. — Angel Haze

The NT brain learns to categorize and direct incoming signals. NT's "catch" what comes at them; this deadens the impact. The act of deadening or filtering stimuli is called "symbolic filtering" (a term developed for this book). Symbolic filtering converts real world stimuli into an internal symbolic representation of the real world. When the external world is taken in as words, it is physically painless. — Ian Ford

Bureaucratic categories and organizational boxes do more than simply separate relevant from irrelevant information. They also produce the social optics that policymakers and bureaucrats use to see the world. Before policymakers can act, they first must come to create a definition and understanding of the situation, and that understanding is mediated by how the institution is organized to think. ...How organizations categorize and carve up the world has a profound impact on how policymakers see the world. — Michael Barnett

Males categorize their worlds by counting, naming, and organizing the objects they confront. Women, in addition to personalizing their topics, talk in a more dynamic way, focusing on how their topics change. Discussions of change require more verbs. — James W. Pennebaker

My sound is constantly progressing and maturing. It's hard with all the songs that I have written over the years to compile them all into one album. It's almost impossible to categorize them into one genre. — Asher Monroe

Love is never static, but always evolving. Love is simultaneously random and ordered, so intangible and yet a part of everything, and when we attempt to limit it or categorize it, we get into trouble. — James Van Praagh

Throughout life, we are put into boxes to categorize how people see and know us. This is how stereotypes originate, because people would rather read the labels on the box instead of taking a look and seeing what's inside — Gaby Rodriguez

You really can't categorize my music, it's human music. — Kendrick Lamar

It's easy to minimize a person's hurt without understanding the nature of pain. People often like to categorize how much a person should or shouldn't hurt about things. For example, when someone is upset about something, they say, "At least you're not paralyzed, or starving in Africa." While it's imperative to be grateful for what we have, I think people often mistaken the nature of pain, when they 'categorize' in this way. The criteria for how much something hurts is not dependent on the thing itself. It is dependent on 2 things:
1. The strength of the attachment.
2. The level of Divine help.
Therefore to minimize the devastation of pain:
1. Don't be attached to (dependent on) temporary things.
2. Seek Divine help.
And don't assign judgement for people's pain. — Yasmin Mogahed

I never favored any political party. Being a conservative or a liberal, a Republican or a Democrat, these are just labels that people use to categorize each other so that they can quickly decide whether or not they want to listen to what they have to say. Politicians are not interested in empathizing with each other. They simply try to do as little as possible in the way of serving the public while building their reputation among their peers, amassing power and wealth that is unimaginable to the common American citizen that they supposedly represent. — Aaron B. Powell

I submit these assorted pieces of evidence I'm unwilling to categorize! — Lemony Snicket

If I was gay, I wouldn't need an asterisk beside my name. I could stop worrying if the girl I like will bounce when she finds out I also like dick. I could have a coming-out party without people thinking I just want attention. I wouldn't have to explain that I fall in love with minds, not genders or body parts. People wouldn't say I'm 'just a slut' or 'faking it' or 'undecided' or 'confused.' I'm not confused. I don't categorize people by who I'm allowed to like and who I'm allowed to love. Love doesn't fit into boxes like that. It's blurry, slippery, quantum. It's only limited by our perceptions and before we slap a label on it and cram it into some category, everything is possible. — Leah Raeder

I can't blame you for trying to categorize me. It's a human instinct. It's why scientists are, to this day, completely flabbergasted by the duck-billed platypus: it's furry like a mammal, but lays eggs like a bird. It defies conventional classification.
I AM THE PLATYPUS (Coo coo ka-choo) — Jeff Garvin

To name is to dominate, to categorize, to subjugate and, quite literally, to objectify — Charles Eisenstein

The framing of women's abuse narratives as quasi-legal testimony encourages the public, as interpreters, to take the stance of cross-examiners who categorize forgetting as memory failure and insist on completeness and consistency of memory detail through all repeated tellings. The condensed, summarized, or fragmentary nature of abuse memories will rarely withstand this aggressive testing. Few people's memories can. — Sue Campbell

Fundamentally there is just open space, the basic ground, what we really are. Our most fundamental state of mind, before the creation of ego, is such that there is basic openness, basic freedom, a spacious quality; and we have now and have always had this openness. Take, for example, our everyday lives and thought patterns. When we see an object, in the first instant there is a sudden perception which has no logic or conceptualization to it at all; we just perceive the thing in the open ground. Then immediately we panic and begin to rush about trying to add something to it, either trying to find a name for it or trying to find pigeonholes in which we could locate and categorize it. Gradually things develop from there. This development does not take the shape of a solid entity. Rather, this development is illusory, the mistaken belief in a "self" or "ego." Confused mind is inclined to view itself as a solid, ongoing thing, but it is only a collection of tendencies, events. — Chogyam Trungpa

Success, as we categorize it, is a simple and pitiable thing. It's only a matter of degree of wanting, and accident. Wanting plays the major role in everybody's life--accident all the others. The only condition any of us can be sure of in this universe is wanting. How tepid or burning hot the want is depends on accident. But since accident isn't really as accidental as we'd like to think--accident is the great fooler and comforter of mankind--we become 'successful' exactly to the degree we want. — Edna Robinson

According to your holy book, every single Buddhist, Jew, Hindu, Muslim, follower of various minor traditions or sects, those who do not affiliate themselves with a religious tradition and the approximately 2.74 billion humans who have never had the 'privilege' of hearing the word of your Messiah will be sentenced to eternal damnation in a lake of fire - regardless of moral standings or positive worldly accomplishments. If this sounds like a fair proposition to you, then I bite my tongue - but I honestly believe that the majority of Christians do not agree with these doctrinal assertions, and instead categorize themselves as 'Christians' out of cultural familiarity or perhaps out of complete ignorance in regards to the topic. — David G. McAfee

Germans try to categorize films: in a comedy, you just laugh and in a drama, you're not allowed to laugh. I don't believe in that, sometimes we laugh and cry in the same hour. — Fatih Akin

Say someone tells me their name - that name can turn into a taste or a color and that's how I categorize it in my mind. It's an easy way of categorizing things. — Ali Banisadr

Life is the tragedy,' she said bitterly. 'You know how they categorize Shakespeare's plays, right? If it ends with a wedding, it's a comedy. And if it ends with a funeral, it's a tragedy. So we're all living tragedies, because we all end the same way, and it isn't with a goddamn wedding. — Robyn Schneider

The Numerati too, are grappling with towering complexity. They're looking for patterns in data that describe something almost hopelessly complex: human life and behavior. The audacity of their mission is almost maddening. They're going to figure out who we're likely to vote for, who we want to work with, perhaps even who we're best suited to love, all from the statistical patterns of data? It's the height of presumption, and it leads to humbling disappointments. Like the trees growing in the forests of Minnesota, we confound those who try to categorize us, and we do it most of the time without even trying. Life is complex. — Stephen Baker

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

Clothing, hair, shoes, accessories: these were props, visual cues, that people used to filter information and make instant assessments out of random connections, to categorize and assign value to those who populated their world. And layered beneath the props for sight came those for smell, and hearing, and more, that sense of intangibility that allowed people to read nuance and body language and interpret what the other senses didn't grasp directly; cues that together formed a picture that matched perceptions based on expectations and that, when adjusted one way or the other, filtered past the gatekeepers of the mind, allowing Munroe to become whatever she needed to be. — Taylor Stevens

In America, even the critics - which is a pity - tend to genre-ize things. They have a hard time when genres get mixed. They want to categorize things. That's why I love Wes Anderson's films and the Coen Brothers, because you don't know what you're going to get, and very often you get something that you don't expect and that's just what a genre's not supposed to do. — Francis Ford Coppola

For me, genres are a way for people to easily categorize music. But it doesn't have to define you. It doesn't have to limit you. — Taylor Swift

I absolutely would categorize myself as one of successful professional females. I think you can be successful and still be extremely present in a healthy life. — Brooke Shields

I don't categorize people by who I'm allowed to like and who I'm allowed to love. — Leah Raeder

I think ... the history of civilization is an attempt to codify, classify and categorize aspects of human nature that hardly lend themselves to that process. — Tom Stoppard

It turns out that I'm far too schizophrenic musically for people to categorize me. I think people judge me a lot before they ever really know who I am. — Michael Buble

People who are intolerant, categorize and over-react ... should all be dragged against a wall and shot. — Arthur M. Jolly

On a scale ranging from very little to too much, Merkin could just about categorize the amount of personal data stored in Master Loo's computer as a shitload. — Sorin Suciu

As an actor, you're constantly searching for that great character. Also, being a history buff and learning about people in our past and amazing things that they've done, I came across a book about Howard Hughes and he was set up as basically, the most multi-dimensional character I could ever come across. Often, people have tried to define him in biographies, but no one seems to be able to categorize him. — Leonardo DiCaprio

I see, or at least it appears to me, that there is some concerted effort to discredit them, and categorize the American Indian Movement as some adverse entity, as opposed to it being a manifestation of the desperations of a whole race of people. — Leonard Peltier

You might categorize your own fear as anxiety. But while the reality of fear is different for each of us, one thing remains constant: fear robs us of joy. When fear takes center stage, we find it impossible to live in the "what is" because of the "what might be. — Sheila Walsh