Specialists Quotes

“How wrong Emily Dickinson was! Hope is not "the thing with feathers." The thing with feathers has turned out to be my nephew. I must take him to a specialist in Zurich.”
― Woody Allen, Without Feathers

“The range of human knowledge today is so great that we're all specialists and the distance between specializations has become so great that anyone who seeks to wander freely between them almost has to forego closeness with the people around him.”
― Robert M. Pirsig

“The team must consist of three sorts of specialists, he says. Otherwise the revolution, whether in politics or the arts or the sciences or whatever, is sure to fail.
The rarest of these specialists, he says, is an authentic genius - a person capable of having seemingly good ideas not in in general circulation. "A genius working alone," he says, "is invariably ignored as a lunatic."
The second sort of specialist is a lot easier to find; a highly intelligent citizen in good standing in his or her community, who understands and admires the fresh ideas of the genius, and who testifies that the genius is far from mad. "A person like this working alone," says Slazinger, "can only yearn loud for changes, but fail to say what their shaped should be."
The third sort of specialist is a person who can explain everything, no matter how complicated, to the satisfaction of most people, no matter how stupid or pigheaded they may be. "He will say almost anything in order to be interesting and exciting," says Slazinger. "Working alone, depending solely on his own shallow ideas, he would be regarded as being as full of shit as a Christmas turkey.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Bluebeard

“I believe strongly that philosophy has nothing to do with specialists.”
― Gilles Deleuze

“I spent most of my life trying to specialize myself. I went to theater school, film school, music school, mime school ... Finally, I was able to gather enough knowledge to build the confidence to create my own work, that goes utterly against the sense of specialization.”
― Nuno Roque

“A specialist’s mind is a slave to his specialization.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Intellectually curious men become generalists. Intellectually lazy men settle for being specialists.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Maybe, kneeling down to atoms, they're becoming atom-sized in their souls. Maybe a specialist is only a coward, afraid to look out of his little cage. And think what any specialist misses--the whole world over his fence.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“These forays into the real world sharpened his view that scientists needed the widest possible education. He used to say, “How can you design for people if you don’t know history and psychology? You can’t. Because your mathematical formulas may be perfect, but the people will screw it up. And if that happens, it means you screwed it up.” He peppered his lectures with quotations from Plato, Chaka Zulu, Emerson, and Chang-tzu.

But as a professor who was popular with his students—and who advocated general education—Thorne found himself swimming against the tide. The academic world was marching toward ever more specialized knowledge, expressed in ever more dense jargon. In this climate, being liked by your students was a sign of shallowness; and interest in real-world problems was proof of intellectual poverty and a distressing indifference to theory.”
― Michael Crichton, The Lost World

“Imagine if one should drag an innocent passer-by from the street to the operating room of a nearby hospital and force him at gunpoint to perform a delicate operation. The man would burst into tears. However, if one were to ask him to sound off on problems such as nuclear experiments, Vietnam, the borders of Israel, support for Indonesia, aid to Latin America, or recognition of Red China, in most cases he would start spouting opinions.”
― Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism Revisited: from de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot

“An outsider may wonder how deep a specialist must dig his hole before he realizes that he has lost sight of the horizon...”
― Thor Heyerdahl, Early Man and the Ocean: A Search for the Beginnings of Navigation & Seaborne Civilizations

“Specialists must feel special.”
― Alain Bremond-Torrent, running is flying intermittently

“I was born into a world full of 'specialists'. I'm not sure whether it's the result of our education system or just natural entropy, but it's very uncommon to know a poet with even a mediocre knowledge about art, or an artist with a good taste in poetry, and so on and on. What this really is: lack of general education in a structural sense: god knows how many people I've met that are actually PROUD about proclaiming their ignorance about another field: it is as if it signifies their 'devotion to one path' while in reality they really only look like a buffoon if you ask me. New is that I am encountering 'Literary Critics' that proudly proclaim to 'never have read any foreign poetry' as if a 'movie critic' that only has watched Dutch films would be somehow capable of criticizing them in any true sense of the word.”
― Martinus Hendrikus Benders

“Memorizing the writer's handbook doesn't make you a writer. It makes you a specialist, and it puts you to a class with people who were given the same training. You all share the same view from the same room.”
― Keith Buckley, Scale

“If you will invest the maximum amount of time in hard work, polishing and building your own land of promise, you will become great in life. You will become exceptional. You will become a specialist and the world would want to reckon with you.”
― Sunday Adelaja, How To Become Great Through Time Conversion: Are you wasting time, spending time or investing time?

“Walimu ndiyo wanaotengeneza wataalamu.”
― Enock Maregesi

“Given the distinct pressures to specialize in various professional fields, we are losing track of the advantages of developing in the entirety of the human psyche.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Engaging specialists in interpreting ancient artifacts in Egypt is absolutely necessary in establishing a credible hypothesis. Without their input, there cannot be a comprehensive understanding of the past. For instance, the pyramids on the Giza Plateau were built not by Egyptologists or archaeologists but by engineers and craftsmen. It is not surprising, therefore, that Egyptologists overlook engineering features and nuances that would be recognized immediately by those who are trained in those disciplines.”
― Christopher Dunn, Lost Technologies of Ancient Egypt: Advanced Engineering in the Temples of the Pharaohs

“You should be suspicious when the medical profession do not refer you to the correct specialists for your occupational diseases.”
― Steven Magee

“We never know what an artist is going to do. Of course not. The artist is not a specialist. All such divisions as animal painters, landscape painters, painters of Scotch cattle in an English mist, painters of English cattle in a Scotch mist, racehorse painters, bull-terrier painters, all are shallow. If a man is an artist he can paint everything.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lecture to Art Students

“Extreme specialization has been the greatest disaster of the modern academic world. It has created narrow Mandarins, ignorant of the universal nature of reality, incapable of connecting concepts from different fields to bring everything together in one ultimate, unified subject. The AC is everything the academic world is not. It’s about connecting everything. It demands that people be generalists, not the most narrow, blinkered specialists.”
― David Sinclair

“A machine can be built to do any accurately described job better than any man. The superiority of a man is that he can do an unexpected, undescribed, and emergency job ... provided he hasn't been especially trained to be a machine.”
― MURRAY F. YACO, Unspecialist

“Many patients are misdiagnosed by the medical profession.”
― Steven Magee