David Viscott Quotes

Order, unity, and continuity are human inventions, just as truly as catalogues and encyclopedias.

Typically, booksellers like to put things into neat little categories.

i happen to enjoy categorization.

There was nothing medieval people liked better, or did better, than sorting out and tidying up. Of all our modern inventions I suspect that they would most have admired the card index.

I kind of have a Victorian sensibility - I don't understand stuff until I can classify it and name it.

I like things in their proper places.

Never label anything 'Miscellaneous.'

I'm very much into making lists and breaking things apart into categories.

Lists are how I parse and manage the world.

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.

You guys, line up alphabetically by height.

All things have their place, knew wee how to place them.

I like organizing things. I like organizing my closets, so that I know where everything is. And and I used to color code it.

The idea of dates, boxes, categories are very scary for me.

Classes? Categories? Was that what we had come to?

The human animal differs from the lesser primates in his passion for lists.

Order is power.

A place for everything, everything in its place.

Order is a necessary condition for anything the human mind is to understand.

But instead I usually say that, though it may surprise them, I too believe in the necessity of organization.

My filing system is messy but orderly.

No true and perfect human society can be conceived which is not governed by some supreme authority…. Do the sheep when they are all assembled together rule and guide the shepherd?

Any organized social group is always a stratified social body. There has not been and does not exist any permanent social group which is "flat" and in which all members are equal.

There is no instant step from disorder to order.

After I finish writing a chapter, I'll print it out, cut it up into paragraphs, and cut away any transition sentences. Then I shuffle all the paragraphs and lay them out as they come. As I arrange and hold them next to each other, very quickly a natural structure for the chapter presents itself.