“Classifying thoughts, feelings and behaviors as diseases is a logical and semantic error, like classifying whale as fish.”

— Thomas Szasz

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Thomas Szasz 70

Hungarian psychiatrist 1920–2012

Roy R. Grinker, Sr. (1900–1993) American psychiatrist and neurologist

Grinker and Robbins (1954) cited in: Eugene Frederick Hahn (1956) Stuttering: significant theories and therapies. p. 17

“I don't know of anybody in my administration who leaked classified information. If somebody did leak classified information, I'd like to know it.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2003
Source: October 1, 2003, Suntimes.com http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-bush01.html (see also July 18, 2005)

“At first critics classified authors as Ancients, that is to say, Greek and Latin authors, and Moderns, that is to say, every post-Classical Author. Then they classified them by eras, the Augustans, the Victorians, etc., and now they classify them by decades, the writers of the '30's, '40's, etc. Very soon, it seems, they will be labeling authors, like automobiles, by the year.”

W. H. Auden book The Dyer's Hand

"Reading", p. 12
The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays (1962)

“She knew about these asteroids, of course. It was because she had classified them in the wrong mental category that she hadn’t thought of them.”

Ken MacLeod book Learning the World

Source: Learning the World (2005), Chapter 15 “Hollow Spaces of the Forward Cone” (p. 249)

“In shallow men the fish of little thoughts cause much commotion. In oceanic minds the whales of inspiration make hardly a ruffle.”

Yukteswar Giri (1855–1936) Indian yogi and guru

Autobiography of a Yogi (1946)

“[To Mr. Johnson] If you were to make little fishes talk, they would talk like whales.”

Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774) Irish physician and writer

From James Boswell's Life of Johnson (1791), April 27, 1773.

“We are standing on a whale fishing for minnows.”

Joseph Campbell The Power of Myth

Episode 2, Chapter 19
The Power of Myth (1988)

“Ultimately, discovery and invention are both problems of classification, and classification is fundamentally a problem of finding sameness. When we classify, we seek to group things that have a common structure or exhibit a common behavior.”

Grady Booch (1955) American software engineer

Source: Object-oriented design: With Applications, (1991), p. 133

“After defining semantical concepts like logical truth and related ones, I proposed to interpret the modalities as those properties of propositions which correspond to certain semantical properties of the sentences expressing the propositions. For example, a proposition is logically necessary if and only if a sentence expressing it is logically true.”

Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) German philosopher

Source: Carnap’s intellectual biography (1963), p. 62

“All thinking is of disturbance, dynamical, a state of unrest tending towards equilibrium. It is all a mode of classifying and of criticising with a view of knowing whether it gives us, or is likely to give us, pleasure or no.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Thinking
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part V - Vibrations

“Classifying thoughts, feelings and behaviors as diseases is a logical and semantic error, like classifying whale as fish.”

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Thomas Szasz 70

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