Richard Thaler Quotes

If you do not know the names of things, the knowledge of them is lost, too.

People are so afraid to say the word 'comic'. It makes you think of a grown man with pimples, a ponytail and a big belly. Change it to 'graphic novel' and that disappears.

The term 'disrupter' has become an accolade, like first-responder or something.

I refuse to use terms like 'optimist' or 'pessimist' and instead prefer 'realist.'

Labeling someone as an '-ist' who believes in an '-ism' because of the person's policy preference is just a shortcut to playground-style name-calling, cloaked in political terminology.

I'm starting to believe in the power of a name. Because it can't be a mistake if I just call it 'change.'

Whether the person should then be called "an intellectual" seems to reduce the issue to a question of terminology.

Definitions belong to the definer, not the defined.

A classification is a definition comprising a system of definitions.

A piece of cloth that is called "linen" has more validity than calling you and me "black" or "negro." "Cotton" has more validity as cotton than yours and my being "black."

I have a suggestion for a new name for the developing world. Let's call it the world.

It's impossible to talk without labels. "Dog" is a label, but that doesn't mean it's meaningless, nor does it mean there's no difference in a Shih Tzu and a Doberman.

Many errors, of a truth, consist merely in the application of the wrong names of things.

Naming is like putting a stamp on something and fixing it. A kind of formaldehyde sort of fixation, but it becomes dead, sitting there forever, frozen. So, I'm not a great one for these modernist, post modernist, post colonial labels. I think they serve certain purpose. You do need some kind of sign post here and there, but it can also become an end in itself.

There is no reason why people should not call themselves Cubists, or Octagonists, or Parallelopipedonists, orKnights oftheIsoscelesTriangle, or Brothers of the Cosine, if they so desire; as expressing anything serious and permanent, one term is as fatuous as another.

Whoever has power takes over the noun - and the norm - while the less powerful get an adjective.

When I hear the word independent I reach for my revolver. At this point, what the hell does that mean? The English Patient is an independent film... Hootie and the Blowfish are alternative music. I'm the Queen of Denmark. I don't know what it means anymore.

Race designation is a political designation.

If you put a label on yourself, people will pigeonhole you.

The concept, the label, is perpetually hiding from us all the nature of the real.

I think it's just easier for people to put you in a box or a lane because you look similar. I think that's unfair for anybody in any situation.

If you label it this, then it can't be that.

Why do you have to choose what type of woman you are? Why do you have to label yourself anything?

Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the non-sucker, not exactly the same thing.

My doubts stand in a circle around every word, I see them before I see the word, but what then! I do not see the word at all, I invent it.