Generalization quotes:

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  • An idea is always a generalization, and generalization is a property of thinking. To generalize means to think. -- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
  • Generalization is necessary to the advancement of knowledge; but particularity is indispensable to the creations of the imagination. -- Thomas B. Macaulay
  • The English have all the material requisites for the revolution. What they lack is the spirit of generalization and revolutionary ardour. -- Karl Marx
  • Even the recognition of an individual whom we see every day is only possible as the result of an abstract idea of him formed by generalization from his appearances in the past. -- James G. Frazer
  • I think women are really good at making friends and not good at networking. Men are good at networking and not necessarily making friends. That's a gross generalization, but I think it holds in many ways. -- Madeleine Albright
  • Generalization is necessary to the advancement of knowledge; but particularly is indispensable to the creations of the imagination. In proportion as men know more and think more they look less at individuals and more at classes. They therefore make better theories and worse poems. -- Thomas B. Macaulay
  • Generalization is always a new influx of divinity into the mind. Hence the thrill that attends it. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • Pay attention to minute particulars. Take care of the little ones. Generalization and abstraction are the plea of the hypocrite, scoundrel, and knave. -- William Blake
  • Generalization, especially risky generalization, is one of the chief methods by which knowledge proceeds... Safe generalizations are usually rather boring. Delete that "usually rather." Safe generalizations are quite boring. -- Joseph Epstein
  • Generalization is flawed thinking only when applied to individuals. It is the most accurate way to describe the mass, the Wad. And yours is a democracy, a dictatorship of the Wad. -- Trevanian
  • Generalizations, one is told, are dangerous. So is life, for that matter, and it is built up on generalization - from the earliest effort of the adventurer who dared to eat a second berry because the first had not killed him. -- Freya Stark
  • All generalizations are false, including this one. -- Mark Twain
  • Every generalization is dangerous, especially this one. -- Mark Twain
  • Avoid context and specifics; generalize and keep repeating the generalization. -- Jack Schwartz
  • Crude classifications and false generalizations are the curse of the organized life. -- H. G. Wells
  • The highest of generalizations is the synergetic integration of truth and love. -- R. Buckminster Fuller
  • It is reckless to make broad generalizations about any group of people. -- Roger Ebert
  • There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation. -- Richard P. Feynman
  • There are no generalizations in American politics that vested selfishness cannot cut through. -- John Gunther
  • Men are more apt to be mistaken in their generalizations than in their particular observations. -- Niccolo Machiavelli
  • The museum spreads its surfaces everywhere, and becomes an untitled collection of generalizations that mobilize the eye. -- Robert Smithson
  • An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular. -- Anatole Broyard
  • Generalizations, like brooms, ought not to stand in a corner forever; they ought to sweep as a matter of course. -- John Lukacs
  • I've lived with boys and girls, and I find that boys are generally cleaner than girls. Generally! This is a big generalization! -- Sam Claflin
  • It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations. -- Jacques Yves Cousteau
  • 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
  • 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
  • For my part I distrust all generalizations about women, favorable and unfavorable, masculine and feminine, ancient and modern; all alike, I should say, result from paucity of experience. -- Bertrand Russell
  • Footballers do get a hard time, and there is a lot of generalization going on. When you get to meet players and know them as lads, it's always a bit different. -- Frank Lampard
  • So the English approach to show business and their work is more - and this is a big generalization, I hasten to say - but it's more, they work on it as a craft job. -- Elizabeth McGovern
  • Darwin based his theory on generalizations that were strictly empirical. You can go out and see that organisms do vary, that variations are inherited, and that every organism is capable of increasing its numbers in sufficiently favorable circumstances. -- George C. Williams
  • It is one of the more striking generalizations of biochemistry - which surprisingly is hardly ever mentioned in the biochemical textbooks - that the twenty amino acids and the four bases, are, with minor reservations, the same throughout Nature. -- Francis Crick
  • I only know from my own personal experience, and I personally feel that there's a cyclical nature to things, so you don't want to start making generalizations about how bad things have become in comparison to the old days. -- Jeffrey Jones
  • To make an absolutely gross generalization, I think a lot of people feel like if you're mixed, more often than not you're quote unquote white. So if you're mixed, you embrace the mainstream culture more than the African-American culture. -- Keegan-Michael Key
  • As the generalization goes about the art industry, people can be really challenging and thought-provoking in their thinking and questioning the status quo, and it's really important that the status quo can be questioned and that there are people doing that. -- Lily Cole
  • I tend to support and get behind issues instead of candidates, because of the whole 'Super Bowl' generalization of our world - You're on this side, I'm on that side; you're a Republican, I'm a Democrat; you're country music, I'm rock music. -- Brandi Carlile
  • The stumbling way in which even the ablest of the scientists in every generation have had to fight through thickets of erroneous observations, misleading generalizations, inadequate formulation, and unconscious prejudice is rarely appreciated by those who obtain their scientific knowledge from textbooks. -- James Bryant Conant
  • Texas is a country in its own. It's made up of half Mexico/half United States but completed mixed. I don't mean to draw a generalization but it is a place, a territory, that's really made up of all these encounters, you know? -- Gael Garcia Bernal
  • Crime seems to change character when it crosses a bridge or a tunnel. In the city, crime is taken as emblematic of class and race. In the suburbs though, it's intimate and psychological, a mystery resist to generalization, a mystery of the individual soul. -- Barbara Ehrenreich
  • I could have been on a path that led to different, more traditional teen romance, and 'Nip/Tuck' shook me loose from any generalization I might have been forced into. It helped me understand I wanted to take on things that were edgier, more challenging and riskier. -- Seth Gabel
  • Data without generalization is just gossip. -- Robert M. Pirsig
  • The true enemy of man is generalization. -- Czeslaw Milosz
  • An aphorism is a generalization, therefore not modern. -- John Fowles
  • In general, generalization is to lie, to tell lies. -- B.S. Johnson
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  • Particular facts are never scientific; only generalization can establish science. -- Claude Bernard
  • What distinguishes the historian from the collector of historical facts is generalization. -- Edward Hallett Carr
  • God is our name for the last generalization to which we can arrive. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • No one sees further into a generalization than his own knowledge of detail extends. -- William James
  • To minds of a certain cast there is nothing so captivating as simplification and generalization. -- Thomas Malthus
  • Hate generalizes; love specifies. Or: The movements of hatred are toward generalization; love's movements are toward specification. -- Robin Morgan
  • The curious thing about individuals is that their singularity always goes beyond any category or generalization in the book. -- Haruki Murakami
  • A single observation that is inconsistent with some generalization points to the falsehood of the generalization, and thereby 'points to itself'. -- Ian Hacking
  • Limitation is a good discipline because it discourages inappropriate generalization, which distracts attention from the profound, particular complexity that characterizes anything at all. -- Marilynne Robinson
  • Happiness is a specific. Misery is a generalization. People usually know exactly why they are happy. They very rarely know why they are miserable. -- Jeanette Winterson
  • One generalization that is supported both by research and experience is that effective two-way communication is essential to proper functioning of the leader-follower relationship. -- John W. Gardner
  • I do think that there are - again, gross generalization - more women than men that can tolerate that or that are OK with that. -- Maryann Brandon
  • As a broad generalization, big businesses have no moral objections to being whores. Getting into bed with Uncle Sam is all a question of price, not principle. -- Jonah Goldberg
  • The idea which...shuts out the Second Coming from our minds, the idea of the world slowly ripening to perfection, is a myth, not a generalization from experience. -- C. S. Lewis
  • Prediction can never be absolutely valid and therefore science can never prove some generalization or even test a single descriptive statement and in that way arrive at final truth. -- Gregory Bateson
  • How can a modern anthropologist embark upon a generalization with any hope of arriving at a satisfactory conclusion? By thinking of the organizational ideas that are present in any society as a mathematical pattern. -- Edmund Leach
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