Categorizing Quotes

“If you want to help someone move on, you don’t label people as good, bad, worst or best. This categorizes people, rather than experiences with that person. People are not all evil or all good. You don’t teach compassion by categorizing people. Empathy and honest open communication are the only way to live your life. If you’re blaming someone then you haven’t let go of your pain long enough to really try on theirs. However, if you must believe that the only type of person that brings you difficult lessons or experiences in life are those that are bad or worse, then take the time to read the bible a little closer. Christ, put a few people in their place, in order to make point.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Sometimes, it is easier for people to believe lies then deal with the uncomfortableness of their own fear of action. These type of people feel uncomfortable unless everyone is the same or God presents them with what is easy and obvious. It is a life long coping mechanism for the greatest fear of all--regret.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“People were always guessing like that, categorizing me as one thing or another, but Mr. Locke assured me they were all equally incorrect. “A perfectly unique specimen,” he called me.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“In my opinion the separation of the c- and ac-stars is the most important advancement in stellar classification since the trials by Vogel and Secchi ... To neglect the c-properties in classifying stellar spectra, I think, is nearly the same thing as if a zoologist, who has detected the deciding differences between a whale and a fish, would continue classifying them together.”
― Ejnar Hertzsprung

“We discovered that people learn concepts faster and remember them better when they can categorize them into groups. That’s prototypical top-down cognition.”
― Wendy Wood, Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

“Personally, I think knowing the difference between a racist and a saint is kind of  important. But when Jesus again and again says things like the last shall be first, and the first shall be last, and the poor are blessed, and the rich are cursed, and that prostitutes make great dinner guests, it makes me wonder if our need for pure black-and-white categories is not true religion but maybe actually a sin. Knowing what category to place hemlock in might help us know whether it's safe to drink, but knowing what category to place ourselves and others in does not help us know God in the way that the church so often has tried to convince us it does.”
― Nadia Bolz-Weber, Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People

“There is no them and us, it is just us.”
― Kerry Daynes, The Dark Side of the Mind: True Stories from My Life as a Forensic Psychologist