Over Specialization Quotes

#1. Rex has never been unkind to me intentionally. It's just that he isn't a real person at all; he's just a few faculties of a man highly developed; the rest simply isn't there.

Evelyn Waugh

#2. There is also hope that even in these days of increasing specialization there is a unity in the human experience.

Allan McLeod Cormack

#3. The Purpose gives the array of these actions coherence, not just at any given moment, but over time, and thus helps ensure that the firm does achieve a genuine specialization, a genuine difference from its competitors. In this way it makes superior profits possible. Purpose

Nikos Mourkogiannis

#4. Adam Smith pointed out that there were three things that make us more prosperous, in a general sort of way: freedom to pursue our own self-interest; specialization, which he called division of labor; and freedom of trade.

P. J. O'Rourke

#5. In the general tendency toward specialization, philosophy too has established itself as a specialized discipline, one purified of all specific content. In so doing, philosophy has denied its own constitutive concept: the intellectual freedom that does not obey the dictates of specialized knowledge.

Theodor Adorno

#6. The shoemaker makes a good shoe because he makes nothing else.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#7. Intelligence augmentation decreases the need for specialization and increases participatory complexity.

Jamais Cascio

#8. But while I accept specialization in the practice, I reject it utterly in the theory of science.

Claude Bernard

#9. Intellectually curious men become generalists. Intellectually lazy men settle for being specialists.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#10. How could any entrepreneur, confronted by such amazing opportunities to help transform the world and to do so with such extraordinary colleagues, be tempted to lose focus? Especially since the work involves such breadth that the boredom of routine or specialization does not exist.

Bill Drayton

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. Of course, our failures are a consequence of many factors, but possibly one of the most important is the fact that society operates on the theory that specialization is the key to success, not realizing that specialization precludes comprehensive thinking.

R. Buckminster Fuller

#14. A specialist's mind is a slave to his specialization.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#15. In this age of specialization, I sometimes think of myself as the last 'generalist' in economics, with interests that range from mathematical economics down to current financial journalism. My real interests are research and teaching ...

Paul Samuelson

#16. Specialization is for insects ... The race of man? He's a whole other creature.

Robert A. Heinlein

#17. The combination of professionalism and technology may also result in narrow-minded specialization more suited to a debating society than to an organization whose task it is to cope with, and indeed live in, the dangerous and uncertain environment of war.

Martin Van Creveld

#18. Reengineering posits a radical new principle: that the design of work must be based not on hierarchical management and the specialization of labor but on end-to-end processes and the creation of value for the customer.

Michael Martin Hammer

#19. Overemphasis of the competitive system and premature specialization on the ground of immediate usefulness kill the spirit on which all cultural life depends, specialized knowledge included.

Albert Einstein

#20. We are in an age that assumes the narrowing trends of specialization to be logical, natural, and desirable. Consequently, society expects all earnestly responsible communication to be crisply brief ... In the meantime, humanity has been deprived of comprehensive understanding.

R. Buckminster Fuller

#21. If it is to be effective as a tool of thought, a notation must allow convenient expression not only of notions arising directly from a problem, but also of those arising in subsequent analysis, generalization, and specialization.

Kenneth E. Iverson

#22. To function effectively, the system scientist must know a considerable amount about the natural world AND about mathematics, without being an expert in either field. This is clearly a prescription for career disaster in today's world of ultra-high specialization.

John L. Casti

#23. Everybody else specializes. Daddy knows everything, and he puts the pieces together.

Robert A. Heinlein

#24. Literacy, the visual technology, dissolved the tribal magic by means of its stress on fragmentation and specialization and created the individual.

Marshall McLuhan

#25. In our factories, we create flexibility by paying more to workers who can work at more stations on a production line. We value flexibility, and we pay for it. In contrast, most product development organizations exclusively reward specialization.

Donald G. Reinertsen

#26. Only by strict specialization can the scientific worker become fully conscious, for once and perhaps never again in his lifetime, that he has achieved something that will endure. A really definitive and good accomplishment is today always a specialized act.

Max Weber

#27. The range of human knowledge today is so great that we're all specialists and the distance between specializations has become so great that anyone who seeks to wander freely between them almost has to forego closeness with the people around him.

Robert M. Pirsig

#28. The downside to becoming a doctor, I think, is it's a very long process; four years of medical school, three years of internship, two years of residency, umpteen years of specialization, and then finally you get to be what you have trained almost all your life for.

Jim Lee

#29. Contempt for the degradation of specialization and pedantry. Specialization develops only part of a man; a man partially developed is deformed.

Richard M. Weaver

#30. Outside his own ever-narrowing field of specialization, a scientist is a layman. What members of an academy of science have in common is a certain form of semiparasitic living.

Erwin Chargaff

#31. It would be suicide in the American academy to show too early an interest beyond your doctoral specialization: charges of everything from charlatanry to ambition would be levied and tenure denied. I've seen this first-hand.

Tony Judt

#32. In a market economy with the division and specialization of labor, people use others as means to achieve their ends. This is the essence of market cooperation.

Stephan Kinsella