#classification

In reaction against the age-old slogan, "woman is the weaker vessel," or the still more offensive, "woman is a divine creature," we have, I think, allowed ourselves to drift into asserting that "a woman is as good as a man," without always pausing to think what exactly we mean by that. What, I feel, we ought to mean is something so obvious that it is apt to escape attention altogether, viz: (...) that a woman is just as much an ordinary human being as a man, with the same individual preferences, and with just as much right to the tastes and preferences of an individual. What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person. ↗

— Dorothy L. Sayers

#clichés #dignity #discrimination #double-standards #empowerment

We are much too much inclined in these days to divide people into permanent categories, forgetting that a category only exists for its special purpose and must be forgotten as soon as that purpose is served. ↗

— Dorothy L. Sayers

#classification #individuality #stereotypes #stereotypes

In teaching, I wanted to offer a general pharmacology course based on chemical principles, biochemical classification and mathematical modelling. In the event I achieved neither of my ambitions. ↗

— James W. Black

#based #biochemical #chemical #classification #course

We all behave like Maxwell’s demon. Organisms organize. In everyday experience lies the reason sober physicists across two centuries kept this cartoon fantasy alive. We sort the mail, build sand castles, solve jigsaw puzzles, separate wheat from chaff, rearrange chess pieces, collect stamps, alphabetize books, create symmetry, compose sonnets and sonatas, and put our rooms in order, and all this we do requires no great energy, as long as we can apply intelligence. We propagate structure (not just we humans but we who are alive). We disturb the tendency toward equilibrium. It would be absurd to attempt a thermodynamic accounting for such processes, but it is not absurd to say we are reducing entropy, piece by piece. Bit by bit. The original demon, discerning one molecules at a time, distinguishing fast from slow, and operating his little gateway, is sometimes described as “superintelligent,” but compared to a real organism it is an idiot savant. Not only do living things lessen the disorder in their environments; they are in themselves, their skeletons and their flesh, vesicles and membranes, shells and carapaces, leaves and blossoms, circulatory systems and metabolic pathways - miracles of pattern and structure. It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe. ↗

— James Gleick

#entropy #information #maxwell #organization #experience

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

#against #apartheid #beings #children #classification

I was part of the draft resistance movement in L.A. where we did demonstrations at the draft centre and burned our cards and made a lot of trouble on campus. I had a student classification and they said that anybody who'd taken part in these demonstrations would be reclassified and drafted. And that's when I went to Canada. ↗

— Cheech Marin

#burned #campus #canada #cards #centre

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

— George P. Shultz

#higher #quicker #report #secrecy #will

العيال اللى كانت بتقعد ف أول ديسك وبيتصاحبوا على المدرسين ويفتنوا على أصحابهم، غالبًا لما يكبروا بيبقوا إخوان. والعيال عديمة الموهبة اللي نفسهم يبقوا حاجة بالعافية، بيكبروا ويبقوا ظباط. والعيال اللى كانت بتجيب معاها حلويات مستوردة والمقلمة أم دورين، هم وأصحابهم بيبقوا فلول. والعيال اللى كانت بتقعد معاك ورا تقشّر يوستفاندى وتقزقز لب سوبر وتقلب ريحة الفصل، بيكبروا يبقوا ليبراليين ويطلع ميتين أبوهم علشان علّموا على كل العيال دى وهمّ صغيرين. ↗

— مصطفى إبراهيم

#politicial #social #socialism