Generalization Quotes

1. "All generalizations are false, including this one."
Author: Alexander Chase

2. "During the first half of the present century we had an Alexander von Humboldt, who was able to scan the scientific knowledge of his time in its details, and to bring it within one vast generalization. At the present juncture, it is obviously very doubtful whether this task could be accomplished in a similar way, even by a mind with gifts so peculiarly suited for the purpose as Humboldt's was, and if all his time and work were devoted to the purpose."
Author: Alexander Von Humboldt

3. "I wouldn't worry about it too much, son. Certainly not about the peasants and the servants. They don't feel things as we do.""They're human.""Barely. They might as well be another species. What would happen without us to keep them in check? They wouldn't work the land. They would be at each other's throat if we weren't there to restrain them. Face it, they are driven by their instincts. Granted, that is a generalization, and there are some individuals who rise above that. Personally I think that is how the nobility originated. Even today, with the help of the Gods, hard work and some luck such a man can rise above his station. But as a group…"
Author: Andrew Ashling

4. "In general, generalization is to lie, to tell lies."
Author: B.S. Johnson

5. "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."
Author: Brandi Carlile

6. "Writing about race and crime was not new territory for me. But it can be treacherous. So here are my rules: No stereotypes. No generalizations. No explanations. No apologies. Just the facts, ma'am."
Author: Colin Flaherty

7. "Can we imagine a togetherness that isn't founded on gross generalizations, conceptualizing ourselves as unique individuals who still stand to gain from looking out for one another? Can we identify with each other rather than with categories or masters?"
Author: CrimethInc.

8. "The true enemy of man is generalization."
Author: Czeslaw Milosz

9. "Generalization is a natural human mental process, and many generalizations are true—in average. What often does promote evil behavior is the lazy, nasty habit of believing that generalizations have anything at all to do with individuals."
Author: David Brin

10. "Good teaching is creating really interesting generalizations out of war stories."
Author: Derek Bok

11. "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."
Author: Francis Crick

12. "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?"
Author: Gael Garcia Bernal

13. "An idea is always a generalization, and generalization is a property of thinking. To generalize means to think."
Author: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

14. "Given a thimbleful of [dramatic] facts we rush to make generalizations as large as a tub."
Author: Gordon Willard Allport

15. "Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following upon another as wave follows upon wave, only one great fact with respect to which, since it is unique, there can be no generalizations; only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen."
Author: H.A.L. Fisher

16. "Troubles, you see, is the generalization-word for what God exists in."
Author: Jack Kerouac

17. "Avoid context and specifics; generalize and keep repeating the generalization."
Author: Jack Schwartz

18. "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."
Author: James G. Frazer

19. "A blanket can be a statement—a generalization and truism covering a multitude of categories, like corruption, ineptitude, ignorance, arrogance, greed, and sloth—which would all fall under the blanket of "Politics.""
Author: Jarod Kintz

20. "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."
Author: Jeffrey Jones

21. "There are no generalizations in American politics that vested selfishness cannot cut through."
Author: John Gunther

22. "I think people took Grenada for what it turned out to be, which was a very specific incident and from which one couldn't necessarily make a lot of generalizations."
Author: John Negroponte

23. "As a broad generalization, liberals see income as a public good that is distributed, like crayons in a kindergarten class. If so-and-so didn't get his or her fair share of income, it's because someone or something — government, the system — didn't distribute income properly. To the extent conservatives see income inequality as a problem, it is as an indication of more concrete problems. If the poor and middle class are falling behind the wealthy, it might be a sign of declining or stagnating wages or lackluster job creation. In other words, liberals tend to see income inequality as the disease, and conservatives tend to see it as a symptom."
Author: Jonah Goldberg

24. "I am afraid I am one of those people who continues to read in the hope of sometime discovering in a book a single—and singular—piece of wisdom so penetrating, so soul stirring, so utterly applicable to my own life as to make all the bad books I have read seem well worth the countless hours spent on them. My guess is that this wisdom, if it ever arrives, will do so in the form of a generalization."
Author: Joseph Epstein

25. "I like gross generalizations...I also like disgusting specifics!"
Author: Josh Stern

26. "Our craving for generality has [as one] source … our preoccupation with the method of science. I mean the method of reducing the explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest possible number of primitive natural laws; and, in mathematics, of unifying the treatment of different topics by using a generalization. Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness. I want to say here that it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything, or to explain anything. Philosophy really is "purely descriptive."
Author: Ludwig Wittgenstein

27. "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."
Author: Madeleine Albright

28. "Yet it is unassailably true that so long as we lack omniscience and do not know all of the future, all our generalizations are fallible or only probable. And the history of human error shows that a general consensus, or widespread and unquestioned feeling of certainty, does not preclude the possibility that the future may show us to be in error."
Author: Morris F. Cohen

29. "To engage the written word means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning. It means to uncover lies, confusions, and overgeneralizations, to detect abuses of logic and common sense. It also means to weigh ideas, to compare and contrast assertions, to connect one generalization to another. To accomplish this, one must achieve a certain distance from the words themselves, which is, in fact, encouraged by the isolated and impersonal text. That is why a good reader does not cheer an apt sentence or pause to applaud even an inspired paragraph. Analytic thought is too busy for that, and too detached."
Author: Neil Postman

30. "He resented such questions as people do who have thought a great deal about them. The superficial and slipshod have ready answers, but those looking this complex life straight in the eye acquire a wealth of perception so composed of delicately balanced contradictions that they dread, or resent, the call to couch any part of it in a bland generalization. The vanity (if not outrage) of trying to cage this dance of atoms in a single definition may give the weariness of age with the cry of youth for answers the appearance of boredom."
Author: Peter De Vries

31. "Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end. There is not a piece of science, but its flank may be turned to-morrow; there is not any literary reputation, not the so-called eternal names of fame, that may not be revised and condemned. The very hopes of man, the thoughts of his heart, the religion of nations, the manner and morals of mankind, are all at the mercy of a new generalization. Generalization is always a new influx of the divinity into the mind. Hence the thrill that attends it."
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson

32. "It is reckless to make broad generalizations about any group of people."
Author: Roger Ebert

33. "I've lived with boys and girls, and I find that boys are generally cleaner than girls. Generally! This is a big generalization!"
Author: Sam Claflin

34. "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."
Author: Samuel E. Morison

35. "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."
Author: Seth Gabel

36. "You, who are so observant, will no doubt concede the generalization that people divide into two large classes, those who live mainly in hope and those who live mainly in recollection."
Author: Søren Kierkegaard

37. "Here's a generalization but in my experience, it's true. Women love to sit and talk for no apparent reason but to talk, but we men, we're just not cut out to chitchat for the sake of chitchat—we don't have time for it. We men are very simple people: if we like what we see, we're coming over there. If we don't want anything from you, we're not coming over there. Period."
Author: Steve Harvey

38. "In reading, one should notice and fondle details. There is nothing wrong about the moonshine of generalization when it comes after the sunny trifles of the book have been lovingly collected. If one begins with a readymade generalization, one begins at the wrong end and travels away from the book before one has started to understand it. Nothing is more boring or more unfair to the author than starting to read, say, Madame Bovary, with the preconceived notion that it is a denunciation of the bourgeoisie. We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so that the first thing we should do is to study that new world as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new, having no obvious connection with the worlds we already know. When this new world has been closely studied, then and only then let us examine its links with other worlds, other branches of knowledge."
Author: Vladimir Nabokov

39. "Ideas, of course, have a place in fiction, and any writer of fiction needs a mind. But ideas are not the best subject matter for fiction. They do not dramatize well. They are, rather, a by-product, something the reader himself is led to formulate after watching the story unfold. The ideas, the generalizations, ought to be implicit in the selection and arrangement of the people and places and actions. They ought to haunt a piece of fiction as a ghost flits past an attic window after dark."
Author: Wallace Stegner

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