Top 77 Generalization Quotes
#1. I think it's very difficult to make any single, generalized statements about the press, of course the press is such varied character and quality and to the different media and so on, so a generalization is very difficult.
Walter Millis
#2. 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
#3. No one sees further into a generalization than his own knowledge of detail extends.
William James
#4. 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
#5. Every generalization is dangerous, especially this one.
Mark Twain
#6. An aphorism is a generalization, therefore not modern.
John Fowles
#7. Name the nine prime fallacies," he snapped. "Simplification. Generalization. Circularity. Reduction. Analogy. False causality. Semantism. Irrelevancy ... .
Patrick Rothfuss
#8. 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
#9. A single observation that is inconsistent with some generalization points to the falsehood of the generalization, and thereby 'points to itself'.
Ian Hacking
#10. 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
#11. Avoid context and specifics; generalize and keep repeating the generalization.
Jack Schwartz
#12. The historians criticized a tendency, as they phrased it, to too rapid generalization. Other people blamed my method; and those who complimented me were those who understood me least.
Andre Gide
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. The death camps seem easier to comprehend if we put them all into the basket of one vast generalization, which the term "death camps" implies, but in the process we mythologize or trivialize them.
Ruth Kluger
#16. 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
#17. It is wiser, I believe, to arrive at theory by way of evidence rather than the other way around ... It is more rewarding, in any case, to assemble the facts first and, in the process of arranging them in narrative form, to discover a theory or a historical generalization emerging of its own accord.
Barbara Tuchman
#18. The curious thing about individuals is that their singularity always goes beyond any category or generalization in the book.
Haruki Murakami
#19. This is a horrid generalization, so I'll probably get hate mail from stockbrokers. I would have been forced to get back to work, and would have been less accustomed to being in touch with my feelings and allowing my feelings to drive my decisions and behavior.
William Mapother
#20. 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
#21. There are always exceptions to every generalization.
[A Christian Epilogue]
John B. Cobb Jr.
#22. 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
#23. An idea is always a generalization, and generalization is a property of thinking. To generalize means to think.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#24. 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.
Soren Kierkegaard
#25. An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.
Anatole Broyard
#26. To minds of a certain cast there is nothing so captivating as simplification and generalization.
Thomas Malthus
#27. Law is no explanation of anything; law is simply a generalization, a category of facts. Law is neither a cause, nor a reason, nor a power, nor a coercive force. It is nothing but a general formula, a statistical table.
Florence Nightingale
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. Hate generalizes; love specifies. Or: The movements of hatred are toward generalization; love's movements are toward specification.
Robin Morgan
#31. 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
#32. Prior to any generalization about literature, literary texts have to be read, and the possibility of reading can never be taken for granted. It is an act of understanding that can never be observed, nor in any way prescribed or verified.
Paul De Man
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. Repetition plus translation plus generalization results, with the correct calculation, in clarification. If there is such a thing as 'progress in religion', it can only manifest itself as increasing explicitness.
Peter Sloterdijk
#38. Most historians don't much like generalizations. Indeed, they make a trade of showing that this or that generalization about the past will not work here or there or then.
Edmund Morgan
#40. Making an investment decision is like formulating a scientific hypothesis and submitting it to a practical test. The main difference is that the hypothesis that underlies an investment decision is intended to make money and not to establish a universally valid generalization.
George Soros
#41. Particular facts are never scientific; only generalization can establish science.
Claude Bernard
#42. In general, generalization is to lie, to tell lies.
B.S. Johnson
#43. The best way to combat racism is to have blacks and whites relate to one another as individuals, rather than as racial abstractions ... It becomes much harder to make a nasty generalization about another group after you have spent time in the home of one if its members.
Dennis Prager
#44. Troubles, you see, is the generalization-word for what God exists in.
Jack Kerouac
#45. If it is to be effective as a tool of thought, a notation must allow convenient expression not only of notions arising directly from a problem, but also of those arising in subsequent analysis, generalization, and specialization.
Kenneth E. Iverson
#46. The superficial and the 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.
Peter De Vries
#47. I am not trying to make a point by telling stories. Chosen examples are never serious evidence for any worthwhile generalization.
Richard Dawkins
#48. Generalization is impossible. It is an insult.
Anneli Rufus
#49. The English have all the material requisites for the revolution. What they lack is the spirit of generalization and revolutionary ardour.
Karl Marx
#50. I shall not be alive a half decade hence," said Seldon, "and yet it is of overpowering concern to me. Call it idealism. Call it an identification of myself with that mystical generalization to which we refer by the term, 'man.
Isaac Asimov
#51. There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation.
Richard P. Feynman
#52. My thinking pattern always starts with specifics and works toward generalization in an associational and nonsequential way.
Temple Grandin
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation.
Alfred North Whitehead
#56. 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
#57. 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
#60. 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
#61. The church as we know it today seems a million miles from the New Testament church. That may be a great generalization, but I will stand on it. There is a gulf between our average Christianity and the church of New Testament that makes the Grand Canyon look like a cavity in someone's tooth.
Leonard Ravenhill
#62. Several of the peculiarities of WEIRD culture can be captured in this simple generalization: The WEIRDer you are, the more you see a world full of separate objects, rather than relationships.
Jonathan Haidt
#63. We lay down a fundamental principle of generalization by abstraction: The existence of analogies between central features of various theories implies the existence of a general theory which underlies the particular theories and unifies them with respect to those central features.
E. H. Moore
#64. Without doubt, if we are to go back to that ultimate, integral experience, unwarped by the sophistications of theory, that experience whose elucidation is the final aim of philosophy, the flux of things is one ultimate generalization around which we must weave our philosophical system.
Alfred North Whitehead
#65. What distinguishes the historian from the collector of historical facts is generalization.
Edward Hallett Carr
#66. 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
#67. While it is probably a safe generalization that philosophers and priests have done more harm to women than pornographers, it is not an assertion that most people will today readily accept.
Jack Holland
#68. 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
#69. The Germans, if one may risk a generalization, have a weakness for blaming foreigners for their failures.
William L. Shirer
#71. The Dream thrives on generalization, on limiting the number of possible questions, on privileging immediate answers.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#72. 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.
David Brin
#73. 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
#74. People forget that stereotypes aren't bad because they are always untrue. Stereotypes are bad because they are not always true. If we allow ourselves to judge another based on a stereotype, we have allowed a gross generalization to replace our own thinking.
George Takei
#75. All science ever did was measure a teensy sliver of the universe and assume that everything else behaved the same way.
Peter Watts
#76. ... "Don't Somalis take the part and mistake it for the whole too?" Jeebleh knew e was in a distancing mode, apart from 'them'. ...
Nuruddin Farah
#77. All generalizations, with the possible exception of this one, are false.
Kurt Godel
