A Quote by John Legend
Critics like to describe and categorize things, and categories often have a way of limiting people.
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To perceive is to categorize, to conceptualize is to categorize, to learn is to form categories, to make decisions is to categorize.
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.
I think that it's human nature to categorize and label things. That's generally the way that the medical and psychological professions work. You look at elements of what you have, and you are able to categorize it, and then you can cure it. That's generally what works.
We like to categorize things into showy things and deep things, you know, and things that are high music - important music - and shallow music. And I think that's dangerous, because there's often a mix of both.
I would not describe my personality. And I think when you describe people, you are making a mistake. That's not how they are; that's how you perceive them at that moment. It's limiting in front of something that is magnificent and unlimited: life.
It's poor judgment', said Grandpa 'to call anything by a name. We don't know what a hobgoblin or a vampire or a troll is. Could be lots of things. You can't heave them into categories with labels and say they'll act one way or another. That'd be silly. They're people. People who do things. Yes, that's the way to put it. People who *do* things.
When critics ask you if you feel vindicated by other critics - I didn't like critics then, and I don't like them now. There you go. I've always been outside the mainstream, and it stayed that way.
When people grow up in atmospheres of violence or atmospheres of poverty, they don't normally use hi-falutin' language to describe those things. They would describe some brutal event the same way we would describe getting a taxi or missing the bus.
The left and right are not religious categories. They're often not even value categories.
There's been enough building of fences with labels trying to categorize artists, limiting artists' ability to be themselves.
I think maybe it's more important to know the traditional concepts we have for thinking about how bodies are feminine or masculine or how sexuality is, straight or gay. These categories very often fail to describe the complexity of who we are.
Labeling makes the invisible visible, but it's limiting. Categories are the enemy of connecting. Link, don't rank.
Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside.
[One task of intellectuals is] to break down the stereotypes and reductive categories that are . . . limiting to human thought and communication.
. . . the membership relation for sets can often be replaced by the composition operation for functions. This leads to an alternative foundation for Mathematics upon categories -- specifically, on the category of all functions. Now much of Mathematics is dynamic, in that it deals with morphisms of an object into another object of the same kind. Such morphisms (like functions) form categories, and so the approach via categories fits well with the objective of organizing and understanding Mathematics. That, in truth, should be the goal of a proper philosophy of Mathematics.
I don't believe in landing on one genre. That's too limiting. I don't think about that when I'm writing and recording. I just make what I feel should happen. Genres almost feel like something that's more for the listener; a need to organize it in categories.
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