#Specialization Quotes

“The shoemaker makes a good shoe because he makes nothing else.”

“Those good at war aren't good at peace, and those good at peace aren't good at war.”

“There is nothing so stupid as the educated man if you get him off the thing he was educated in.”

“The work that leads to a doctor's degree is a constant temptation to sacrifice one's growth as a man to one's growth as a specialist.”

“His judgement demonstrates that one can be a genius and understand nothing of an art that is not one's own.”

“We must infer that all things are produced more plentifully and easily and of a better quality when one man does one thing which is natural to him and does it at the right time, and leaves other things.”

“Hardly any human being is capable of pursuing two professions or two arts rightly.”

“All things will be produced in superior quantity and quality, and with greater ease, when each man works at a single occupation, in accordance with his natural gifts, and at the right moment, without meddling with anything else.”

“...that in our state one man was to do one job, and the job he was naturally most suited for .. And further, we have often heard and often said that justice consists of minding your own business and not interfering with other people.”

“Each man is capable of doing one thing well. If he attempts several, he will fail to achieve distinction in any.”

“The knowledge we now consider knowledge proves itself in action. What we now mean by knowledge is information effective in action, information focused on results. Results are outside the person, in society and economy, or in the advancement of knowledge itself. To accomplish anything this knowledge has to be highly specialized.”

“The expert knows more and more about less and less until he knows everything about nothing.”

“Interference by the three classes with each other s jobs, and interchange of jobs between them, therefore, does the greatest harm to our state, and we are entirely justified in calling it the worst of evils.”

“One man cannot practice many arts with success.”

“More will be accomplished, and better, and with more ease, if every man does what he is best fitted to do, and nothing else.”

“The master of a single trade can support a family. The master of seven trades cannot support himself. The wind is never for the sailor who knows not to what port he is bound.”

“The person who knows one thing and does it better than anyone else, even if it only be the art of raising lentils, receives the crown he merits. If he raises all his energy to that end, he is a benefactor of mankind and its rewarded as such.”

“Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.”

“The division of labor, which has brought such perfection in mechanical industries, is altogether fatal when applied to productions of the mind. All work of the mind is superior inproportion as the mind that produces it is universal.”

“The physician who knows only medicine, knows not even medicine.”

“The jack-of-all-trades seldom is good at any. Concentrate all of your efforts on one definite chief aim.”

“Let every man practise the trade which he best understands.”

“Wherever the want of clothing forced them to it, the human race made clothes for thousands of years, without a single man becoming a tailor.”

“In all our academies we attempt far too much. ... In earlier times lectures were delivered upon chemistry and botany as branches of medicine, and the medical student learned enough of them. Now, however, chemistry and botany are become sciences of themselves, incapable of comprehension by a hasty survey, and each demanding the study of a whole life, yet we expect the medical student to understand them. He who is prudent, accordingly declines all distracting claims upon his time, and limits himself to a single branch and becomes expert in one thing.”

“No one achieves greatness by becoming a generalist. You don't hone a skill by diluting your attention to its development. The only way to get to the next level is focus.”

“The strongest must seek a way, say you? But I say: let a ploughman plough, but choose an otter for swimming, and for running light over grass and leaf, or over snow- an Elf!”

“I tell you, the old-fashioned doctor who treated all diseases has completely disappeared, now there are only specialists, and they advertise all the time in the newspapers. If your nose hurts, they send you to Paris: there's a European specialist there, he treats noses. You go to Paris, he examines your nose: I can treat only your right nostril, he says, I don't treat left nostrils, it's not my specialty, but after me, go to Vienna, there's a separate specialist there who will finish treating your left nostril.”

“The same man cannot well be skilled in everything; each has his special excellence.”

“Officials are highly educated but one-sided; in his own department an official can grasp whole trains of thought from a single word, but let him have something from another department explained to him ... he won't understand a word of it.”

“As a rule, the man who can do all things equally well is a very mediocre individual.”

“A special ability means a heavy expenditure of energy in a particular direction, with a consequent drain from some other side of life.”

“In those days a boy on the classical side officially did almost nothing but classics. I think this was wise; the greatest service we can to education today is to teach few subjects. No one has time to do more than a very few things well before he is twenty, and when we force a boy to be a mediocrity in a dozen subjects we destroy his standards, perhaps for life.”