Top 74 Quotes About Specialization
#1. Specialization is the great evil of civilization.
Wendell Berry
#2. The path of specialization leads away from the ordinary and concrete acts of understanding in terms of which man actually lives his day-to-day life.
William Barrett
#4. I've always felt that specialization is best left to the insects.
Gregory Benford
#5. Handoffs are mostly a result of specialization. Organization design cannot reduce these handoffs, but it can make them faster and cheaper by making them occur inside a single team.
Sriram Narayan
#6. The main insight learned from interdisciplinary studies is the return to specialization
George Stigler
#7. Biologically, man is still the great amateur of the animal kingdom; he is unique in his lack of anatomical and physiological specialization.
Rene Dubos
#8. Specialization makes the welfare of the society vulnerable to the market and to political forces beyond national control.
Robert Gilpin
#9. 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
#10. All research in the cultural sciences in an age of specialization, once it is oriented towards a given subject matter through particular settings of problems and has established its methodological principles, will consider the analysis of the data as an end in itself.
Max Weber
#11. 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
#12. The history of learning amounts to a history of specialization.
Beryl Smalley
#13. Specialization is undeniably a powerful social and economic force. And yet it is also debilitating. It breeds helplessness, dependence, and ignorance and, eventually, it undermines any sense of responsibility. Our
Michael Pollan
#14. physical space has for a century been used to facilitate and enforce efficiency and specialization. Along with factory assembly lines, the architectural frames of white-collar work have evolved to maximize efficiency.
Stanley McChrystal
#15. With the variety of fields within economics, broadly conceived and the increasing specialization of scholarly world, the award of a Nobel Memorial Prize honors not only the individual scholar but, implicitly, also a special field or a distinctive method.
Simon Kuznets
#16. 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
#17. People who are constantly looking for the opportunity to do something new are also people who are not going to be helped by having job titles - job titles create expectations of specialization and focus which don't map really well to creating the best possible experience for your customers.
Gabe Newell
#18. Specialization is in fact only a fancy form of slavery wherein the 'expert' is fooled into accepting a slavery by making him feel that he in turn is a socially and culturally preferred-ergo, highly secure-lifelong position.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#19. Don't be afraid to say no to projects. Prove that you're serious about specialization by turning down work that falls outside your area of expertise. The more people you say no to, the more referrals you'll get to people who need your product or service.
John Warrillow
#20. Nowhere has specialization penetrated so deeply into the building professions as North America.
Arthur Erickson
#21. The whole of our civilization is founded on specialization, which implies the enslavement of those who execute to those who coordinate ...
Simone Weil
#23. Bacterial specialization is a thrilling and largely unexplored realm in uncovering what makes each of us distinct in terms of
Martin J. Blaser
#24. Cognitive evolution is marked by many peaks of specialization. The ecology of each species is key. The
Frans De Waal
#25. Considering my specialization in architecture, I'm not surprised that the first graphic novel to thoroughly engage, not to say captivate, me is Chip Kidd and Dave Taylor's 'Batman: Death by Design.'
Martin Filler
#26. God and the Devil are an effort after specialization and the division of labor.
Samuel Butler
#27. Specialization breeds biases that ultimately aggregate as international and ideological discord, which, in turn, leads to war.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#28. Society thrives on trade simply because trade makes specialization possible, and specialization increases output, and increased output reduces the cost in toil for the satisfactions men live by. That being so, the market place is a most humane institution.
Frank Chodorov
#29. It is an ancient belief, going back to classical antiquity, that specialization of any kind is illiberal in a freeman. A man willing to bury himself in the details of some small endeavor has been considered lost to these larger considerations which must occupy the mind of the ruler.
Richard M. Weaver
#30. The process of specialization tends, almost inevitably, to narrow the sources from which the rules of any science are drawn; and English law is no exception from this rule.
Edward Jenks
#31. Today every believer has the potential to become a savior and a deliverer in his own area of specialization if only he/she make himself available
Sunday Adelaja
#32. There is also hope that even in these days of increasing specialization there is a unity in the human experience.
Allan McLeod Cormack
#33. Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. Contempt for the degradation of specialization and pedantry. Specialization develops only part of a man; a man partially developed is deformed.
Richard M. Weaver
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. Literacy, the visual technology, dissolved the tribal magic by means of its stress on fragmentation and specialization and created the individual.
Marshall McLuhan
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. Specialization is for insects ... The race of man? He's a whole other creature.
Robert A. Heinlein
#50. 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
#51. By nature, by necessity itself, [primitive man] is encyclopedic, while civilized man finds himself confined in the infinitely small regions of specialization.
Charles Baudelaire
#52. Rising living standards - whether in a village, a region, a nation, or the world - depend first on specialization: on letting people concentrate on what they do best and trade with others who specialize in other things.
Virginia Postrel
#53. This is an age of specialization, and in such an age the repertory theater is an anachronism, a ludicrous anachronism.
Minnie Maddern Fiske
#54. More and more of out colleagues fail to understand our work because of the high specialization of research problems. We must not be discouraged if the products of our labor are not read or even known to exist. The joy of research must be found in doing since every other harvest is uncertain.
Theobald Smith
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. But while I accept specialization in the practice, I reject it utterly in the theory of science.
Claude Bernard
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. Intelligence augmentation decreases the need for specialization and increases participatory complexity.
Jamais Cascio
#64. But that so many scholars are barbarians does not much matter so long as a few of them are ready to help with their specialized knowledge the few independent thinkers, that is to say the poets, who try to to keep civilization alive.
Robert Graves
#65. It is a wholly deplorable state of affairs when specialists in any discipline talk only to each other, and accordingly I have sought to write a book which will communicate some of the fruits of research in a manner which will make them accessible to all.
Richard Fletcher
#66. All trades, arts, and handiwork have gained by division of labor, namely, when, instead of one man doing everything, each confines himself to a certain kind of work distinct from others in the treatment it requires, so as to be able to perform it with greater facility and in the greatest perfection.
Immanuel Kant
#67. The ideal of an "all-round" education is out of date; it has been destroyed by the progress of knowledge.
Bertrand Russell
#68. Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself- and thus make yourself indispensable.
Andre Gide
#69. To specialize is to brush one tooth. When a person specializes he channels all of his energies through one narrow conduit; he knows one thing extremely well and is ignorant of almost everything else.
Tom Robbins
#71. Intellectually curious men become generalists. Intellectually lazy men settle for being specialists.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#72. 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
#73. Everybody else specializes. Daddy knows everything, and he puts the pieces together.
Robert A. Heinlein
#74. 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
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