Alan Stern Quotes

We, as a people, we have a strong need to categorize everything. We put labels on everything and it's a totally understandable need because we are animals and we need to understand order and where to fit in.

It is the genus that gives the characters, and not the characters that make the genus.

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

People try to contain things by putting them into categories. I don't.

A classification is a definition comprising a system of definitions.

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

I like science - geography, meteorology, cosmology.

Miscellaneous is always the largest category.

We talk about the Internet. That comes from science. Weather forecasting. That comes from science. The main idea in all of biology is evolution. To not teach it to our young people is wrong.

Brian and I were both science students. You know science sort of math and physics side, you know.

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

We are a categorically obsessed culture, where we have to compartmentalize everything in reference to another thing, like, 'What does it sound like? Does it sound like this?'

I love taxonomies, categories, ways of dividing people into groups.

My favorite book is 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' by Bill Bryson.

Are we really certain that the mechanism of society, like the mechanism of the heavenly bodies or the mechanism of the human body, is subject to general laws? Are we really certain that it is a harmoniously organized whole? Or is it not true that what is most notable in society is the absence of all order?

Freedom and equality! They are not to be found on the earth below or in heaven above. The stars on high are not alike, and all obey an iron-like law.

You guys, line up alphabetically by height.

People like to understand and categorize things in order to understand.

I have this amateur side attraction to, and interest in, the sciences and biology and physics and evolution. Paleontology is of interest to me. I'm interested in the way these fields have helped us understand how we are human and why we are human.

I don't mind categories, but it's so hard to find one that fits.

In science, we take large numbers of disparate facts and reduce them to see patterns. We use the patterns to reduce the amount of information. It's the reason we name species and genera and families in biology. It's also the reason we have names for certain types of geological features and so on in other fields.

I love watching programs about Discovery Channel and just reading New Scientist, and all that kind of stuff. Im just fascinated by it.

The trouble with taxonomic boxes is... that that they tend to be empty, however beautiful they are on the outside.

Never have varmints, only grandvarmints.

Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose.