Specialism Quotes

Pornography and obscenity...work by specialism and fragmentation. They deal with a figure without a ground -- situations in which the human factor is suppressed in favor of sensations and kicks. (Marshall McLuhan)

The Eskimo, like any pre-literate, leaps easily from the Paleolithic stone age to the electric age, by-passing the Neolithic specialism.

Marshall McLuhan

With [Francis] Bacon, Vico continuously asserts the claims of grammar as true science precisely because it has not yielded to specialism and method.

Marshall McLuhan

Scholars have an inordinate respect for long books, and have a terrible rancune against those that attempt to cheat on them. They cannot bear to imagine that short-cuts are possible, that specialism is not an inevitability, that learning need not be stoically endured. They cannot bear writers allegro, and when they read such texts-and even pretend to revere them-the result is (this is not a description without generosity) 'unappetizing'.

Nick Land

[intention to make a voyage of discovery through The Netherlands] ... with the aim to apply it as a painter, as well as in my quality of entomologist [specialism, snout beetle].... what parts, provinces or regions of our country [ are] 'least' visited from an entomological point of view..?

Willem Roelofs

Each of the various specialists remains too closely concentrated upon his single specialism, too little awake to those of the others. Each sees clearly and seizes firmly upon one petal of the six-lobed flower of life and tears it apart from the whole.

Patrick Geddes

Altruism itself was so insisted upon in the latter half of the nineteenth century that ... theory and practice, words and deeds, stood in liveliest contradiction. ... Everywhere a conflict rent the world in twain: it created abysses in every thinker's scheme of things: it made its presence so unpleasantly real that the best brains gave up research and thinking, and crept for refuge into a profession, a craft, into libraries, or hid themselves in the mine-shafts of specialism.

Oscar Levy

I had tasted the bait and knew that there was nothing more attractive and more subtle on earth than the Game. I had also observed fairly early that this enchanting Game demanded more than naive amateur players, that it took total possession of the man who had succumbed to its magic. And an instinct within me rebelled against my throwing all my energies and interests into this magic forever. Some naive feeling for simplicity, for wholeness and soundness, warned me against the spirit of the Waldzell Vicus Lusorum. I sensed in it a spirit of specialism and virtuosity, certainly highly cultivated, certainly richly elaborated, but nevertheless isolated from humanity and the whole of life - a spirit that had soared too high into haughty solitariness. For years I doubted and probed, until the decision had matured within me and in spite of everything I decided in favor of the Game. I did so because I had within me that urge to seek the supreme fulfillment and serve only the greatest master.

Hermann Hesse

All other men are specialists, but his specialism is omniscience.

Arthur Conan Doyle

Scholars have an inordinate respect for long books, and have a terrible rancune against those that attempt to cheat on them. They cannot bear to imagine that short-cuts are possible, that specialism is not an inevitability, that learning need not be stoically endured.

Nick Land