I think I remember reading somewhere a glib (or is it deep?) quote, perhaps due to Rota?, which was something like
"All of combinatorics is essentially [or can be reduced to?] the representation theory of the symmetric group."
Does anyone know the actual quote / who said or wrote it / a reference to it? Or even a second-hand or third-hand reference, e.g. a paper where author X says "I've heard it said that..." or "Person Y told me that Rota once said..."
(I tried Googling, but found it difficult to come up with a query that got me quotations as opposed to lots of papers on representation theory, combinatorics, or the symmetric group. The quotation may of course be in such a paper, but the results were often so numerous as to be unhelpful.)