Robert Benchley Quotes

I love finding - or inventing - ways to categorize people.

They don't know how the world is shaped. And so they give it a shape, and try to make everything fit it. They separate the right from the left, the man from the woman, the plant from the animal, the sun from the moon. They only want to count to two.

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

That whole week, we started to divide things into those two categories: anything or something. A piece of jewelry bougth at a department store: anything. A piece of jewelry made by hand: something. A dollar: anything. A sand dollar: something. A gift certificate: anything. An IOU for two hours of starwatching: something. A drunk kiss at a party: anything. A sober kiss alone in a park: something.

We can't start dividing people up into categories. In the past, France has often committed the error of not speaking to everybody because there was a belief that some countries could be neglected.

In movies we tend make things black and white: you're either this, or you're that.

I think I underestimated the way people bracket you.

I'm not the only one that people try to put in a box. I think it's easier for people to understand things when they can categorize them.

When it comes to categorizing people, men and women into a group, it gets to be very dangerous.

All men are forced into one of two categories: those with eleven fingers and those without.

There are three classes into which all the women past seventy that ever I knew were to be divided: 1. That dear old soul; 2. That old woman; 3. That old witch.

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

One of the most basic and pervasive social processes is the sorting and labeling of things, activities, and people... Sorting and labeling processes involve a trade-off of costs and benefits. In general, the more finely the sorting is done, the greater the benefits - and the costs... Sorting and labeling, whether of people or of things, is a sorting and labeling of probabilities rather than of certainties.

Women writers of all people should know better than to pigeonhole women, put them in little groups, the smart one, the sweet one.

there are two kinds of people in this world : those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world and those who are smart enough to know better.

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

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

There are two kinds of people in the world: the kind who alphabetize their record collections, and the kind who don't.

It was so much more comfortable to be able to divide people into heroes and villains and expect them to play their allotted part.

The world isn't split into good people and Death Eaters.

We idealize them as gods or dismiss them as animals.

The western mind makes definitions; it draws lines.

You don't pigeonhole yourself, people pigeonhole you. If the world is not at a place yet where it can just be like, "This music is gay and it's music," then it's not my fault that it gets pigeonholed, it's not the people in the band's fault, it's because people won't just let music be music, people who need to put a name on something or to critique something.

i happen to enjoy categorization.

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