#specialization

The general fact is that the most effective way of utilizing human energy is through an organized rivalry, which by specialization and social control is, at the same time, organized co-operation. ↗

— Charles Horton Cooley

#control #effective #effective way #energy #fact

This is an age of specialization, and in such an age the repertory theater is an anachronism, a ludicrous anachronism. ↗

— Minnie Maddern Fiske

#ludicrous #repertory #specialization #such #theater

Too rigid specialization is almost as bad for a historian's mind, and for his ultimate reputation, as too early an indulgence in broad generalization and synthesis. ↗

— Samuel E. Morison

#bad #broad #early #generalization #his

Nowhere has specialization penetrated so deeply into the building professions as North America. ↗

— Arthur Erickson

#building #deeply #into #north #north america

I tell you, the old-fashioned doctor who treated all diseases has completely disappeared, now there are only specialists, and they advertise all the time in the newspapers. If your nose hurts, they send you to Paris: there's a European specialist there, he treats noses. You go to Paris, he examines your nose: I can treat only your right nostril, he says, I don't treat left nostrils, it's not my specialty, but after me, go to Vienna, there's a separate specialist there who will finish treating your left nostril. ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#health #over-specialization #science #funny

For no continuity of social act is possible without a corresponding social status and the many different kinds of act required in an industrial state, with its high degree of specialization, make for corresponding classification of status. ↗

— Kenneth Burke

#classification #continuity #corresponding #degree #different

The modern spirit is a hesitant one. Spontaneity has given way to cautious legalisms, and the age of heroes has been superseded by a cult of specialization. We have no more giants; only obedient ants. ↗

— Roger Lowenstein

#specialization #spirit #warren-buffett #age

In an age of specialization people are proud to be able to do one thing well, but if that is all they know about, they are missing out on much else life has to offer. ↗

— Dennis Flanagan

#about #age #else #know #life

The outstanding characteristic of Western scholarship is its specialization and cutting up of knowledge into different departments. The over-development of logical thinking and specialization, with its technical phraseology, has brought about the curious fact of modern civilization, that philosophy has been so far relegated to the background, far behind politics and economics, that the average man can pass it by without a twinge of conscience. The feeling of the average man, even of the educated person, is that philosophy is a "subject" which he can beset afford to go without. This is certainly a strange anomaly of modern culture, for philosophy, which should lie closest to men's bosom and business, has become most remote from life. It was not so in the classical civilization of the Greeks and Romans, and it was not so in China, where the study of wisdom of life formed the scholars' chief occupation. Either the modern man is not interested in the problems of living, which are the proper subject of philosophy, or we have gone a long way from the original conception of philosophy. ↗

— Lin Yutang

#philosophy #specialization #business

It is a painful thing to say to oneself: by choosing one road I am turning my back on a thousand others. Everything is interesting; everything might be useful; everything attracts and charms a noble mind; but death is before us; mind and matter make their demands; willy-nilly we must submit and rest content as to things that time and wisdom deny us, with a glance of sympathy which is another act of our homage to the truth. ↗

— Antonin Sertillanges

#generalist #specialization #death