“Dragon is the category of primate predator. Predator is a weird category, right? Because there's crocodiles in it, and then there's lions. And they don't have much in common except that they eat you. So it's a functional category. So the dragon is the imagistic representation of the functional category of predator. It's like this: If you're a monkey, then a bird will pick you off, like an eagle. That's the wings. If it wasn't an eagle, then it was a cat (dragon claws), because they climb trees and give you a good chomping. And if it wasn't a cat, then you go down to the ground and a snake would get you, or maybe the snake would climb up the tree. So a dragon is a cat-snake-bird. And that's the thing that you really want to avoid. An the other thing is that it breathes fire, which is interesting because fire was both greatest friend and greatest enemy of humanity.”

— Jordan Peterson

Concepts

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Jordan Peterson 202

Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and profes… 1962

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“For reasons mentioned at the beginning of this section, we cannot offer here a precise structural definition of semantical category and will content ourselves with the following approximate formulation: two expressions belong to the same semantical category if (I) there is a sentential function which contains one of these expressions, and if (2) no sentential function which contains one of these expressions ceases to be a sentential function if this expression is replaced in it by the other. It follows from this that the relation of belonging to the same category is reflective, symmetrical and transitive. By applying the principle of abstraction, all the expressions of the language which are parts of sentential functions can be divided into mutually exclusive classes, for two expressions are put into one and the same class if and only if they belong to the same semantical category, and each of these classes is called a semantical category. Among the simplest examples of semantical categories it suffices to mention the category of the sentential functions, together with the categories which include respectively the names of individuals, of classes of individuals, of two-termed relations between individuals, and so on. Variables (or expressions with variables) which represent names of the given categories likewise belong to the same category.”

Alfred Tarski (1901–1983) Polish-American logician

Source: The Semantic Conception of Truth (1952), p. 45; as cited in: Schaff (1962) pp. 36-37.

“Giant predator lizards can't evolve in the presence of big mammal predators. So the lesson is that mammals suppress much of the evolutionary potential of modern lizards. Is the Komodo dragon a good working model of how dinosaurs succeeded? Absolutely not. Dinosaurs suppressed the evolutionary potential of mammals, not the other way around. And dinosaurs carried out this supression everywhere, on all the continents, not merely on a few tiny tropical isles. Dinosaurs succeeded where Komodo dragons fail.”

Robert T. Bakker book The Dinosaur Heresies

The Dinosaur Heresies: A Revolutionary View of Dinosaurs (1986), Longman Scientific & Technical, p. 81
The Dinosaur Heresies (1986)

“I'm not so much a dragon slayer, more a dragon annoyer -- I'm a dragon irritater.”

Craig Ferguson (1962) Scottish-born American television host, stand-up comedian, writer, actor, director, author, producer and voice a…

“Outright predators, of course, I understand. I am among them. There is no denying that the feats of predators can be just as gruesome as those of the unlovely parasites: the swathing and sipping of trapped hummingbirds by barn spiders, the occasional killing and eating of monkeys by chimpanzees. If I were to eat as the delicate ladybug eats, I would go through in just nine days the entire population of Boys Town. Nevertheless, the most rapacious lurk and charge of any predator is not nearly so sinister as the silent hatching of barely visible, implanted eggs. With predators, at least you have a chance.”

Annie Dillard book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"The Horns of the Altar", pp. 237–238
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1976)

“I do not think much of ages. People are people. What does it matter how old or young they are? It is a category, and I do not like categories. It is a sort of pigeonhole or a label.”

Louis L'Amour (1908–1988) Novelist, short story writer

Source: The Lonesome Gods

“One of the worst categories of people is the one who always wants to being right knowing you don't have it.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: Una delle peggiori categorie di individui è quella che vuole sempre aver ragione sapendo di non averla.
Source: prevale.net

“Capital, like capitalism, seems an overrated category.”

Ernest Gellner (1925–1995) Czech anthropologist, philosopher and sociologist

Source: Nations and Nationalism (1983), Chapter 7, A Typology Of Nationalism, p. 97

“Vladimir Voevodsky and his collaborators have provided us with a very interesting candidate-category of motives: a category (of sheaves relative to an extraordinarily fine Grothendieck-style topology on the category of schemes) which in some intuitive sense “softens algebraic geometry” so as to allow for a good notion of homotopy in an algebro-geometric setup and is sufficiently directly connected to concrete algebraic geometry to have already yielded some extraordinary applications. The quest for a full theory of motives is a potent driving force in complex analysis, algebraic geometry, automorphic representation theory, the study of L functions, and arithmetic. It will continue to be so throughout the current century.”

Barry Mazur (1937) American mathematician

"WHAT IS...a Motive?" 2004

“They claim Xinjiang belongs to China. So they shouldn't treat it like a colony. Don't be a predator and a conqueror. You treat them as your enemy.”

Pu Zhiqiang (1965) A Chinese lawyer and activist known for being a prominent member of the Weiquan movement.

On the Chinese government's policies towards Uighurs, the mainly Muslim minority living in Xinjiang in China's far west http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-china-blog-31018617 (7 May 2014)

“The new crimes that the US and Israel were committing in Gaza as 2009 opened do not fit easily into any standard category—except for the category of familiarity.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Source: Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel's War Against the Palestinians

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