Top 78 Quotes About Generality
#1. Ambiguity lurks in generality and may thus become an instrument of severity.
Felix Frankfurter
#2. It is good sense applied with diligence to what was at first a mere accident, and which by great application grew to be called, by the generality of mankind, a particular genius.
Samuel Johnson
#3. The art of doing mathematics consists in finding that special case which contains all the germs of generality.
David Hilbert
#4. We should work toward a universal linked information system, in which generality and portability are more important than fancy graphics techniques and complex extra facilities.
Tim Berners-Lee
#5. The generality of men are naturally apt to be swayed by fear rather than reverence, and to refrain from evil rather because of the punishment that it brings than because of its own foulness.
Aristotle.
#6. We must not always judge of the generality of the opinion by the noise of the acclamation.
Edmund Burke
#7. Extra features were once considered desirable. We now recognize that 'free' features are rarely free. Any increase in generality that does not contribute to reliability, modularity, maintainability, and robustness should be suspected.
Boris Beizer
#8. Euclid avoids it [the treatment of the infinite]; in modern mathematics it is systematically introduced, for only then is generality obtained.
Arthur Cayley
#9. The only thing white people have that black people need, or should want, is power - and no one holds power forever. White people cannot, in the generality, be taken as models of how to live.
James Baldwin
#10. As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene.
Jacques Derrida
#12. The generality of men expend the early part of their lives in contributing to render the latter part miserable.
Jean De La Bruyere
#13. It is very rare, indeed, for men to be wrong in their feelings concerning public misconduct; as rare to be right in their speculations upon the cause of it. I have constantly observed that the generality of people are fifty years, at least, behind in their politics.
Edmund Burke
#14. Generality is, indeed, an indispensable ingredient of reality; for mere individual existence or actuality without any regularity whatever is a nullity. Chaos is pure nothing.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#15. No generality has any weight whatever. It is like saying "how do you do?" When you have no intention of inquiring about ones health. But specific claims when made in print are taken at their value
Claude C. Hopkins
#16. The word 'security' is a broad, vague generality whose contours should not be invoked to abrogate the fundamental law embodied in the First Amendment. The guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the expense of informed representative government provides no real security ...
Hugo Black
#17. So the proposition that the ideal parents for any child are its biological parents is a statement with which we can all agree in the generality, but which does not apply, for one reason or another, in many particular circumstances.
Malcolm Turnbull
#18. I wish I could be honest and true, but truth as I see it is not something abstract, a pious generality
It is justice at work, righteous, demanding, disciplined, sincere and unswerving; otherwise, it is not, it cannot be truth at all.
F. Sionil Jose
#19. Beware how you contradict prejudices, even knowing them to be such, for the generality of people are much more tenacious of their prejudices than of anything belonging to them ...
Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
#20. For parlor use, the vague generality is a life saver.
George Ade
#21. Look, some people talk about their personal lives a lot; I try not to, unless it's more of a generality.
Kate Bosworth
#22. I have the vagary of taking a lively interest in mathematical subjects only where I may anticipate ingenious association of ideas and results recommending themselves by elegance or generality.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
#23. Heroism, or military glory, is much admired by the generality of mankind. They consider it as the most sublime kind of merit. Menof cool reflection are not so sanguine in their praises of it.
David Hume
#24. This is why being a helicopter pilot is so different from being an airplane pilot, and why in generality, airplane pilots are open, clear-eyed, buoyant extroverts, and helicopter pilots are brooding introspective anticipators of trouble. They know if something bad has not happened it is about to.
Harry Reasoner
#26. I should tell you that honestly, on my honour of a Nearwicked, I always think in a wordworth's of that primed favourite continental poet, Daunty, Gouty and Shopkeeper, A.G., whom the generality admoyers in this that is and that this is to come.
James Joyce
#27. The generality have considered that disease is but a confused and disordered effort in Nature, thrown down from her proper state, and defending herself in vain.
Thomas Sydenham
#28. Everything that is hard to attain is easily assailed by the generality of men.
Ptolemy
#29. War is a generality, so are the inevitabilities of war, including death.
Marguerite Duras
#30. The person who did most to give to analysis the generality and symmetry which are now its pride, was also the person who made mechanics analytical; I mean Euler.
William Whewell
#31. The generality of friends puts us out of conceit with friendship; just as the generality of religious people puts us out of conceit with religion.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#32. Mathematicians themselves set up standards of generality and elegance in their exposition which are a bar to understand.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#33. Thus we must advance from generalities to particulars; for it is a whole that is best known to sense-perception, (25) and a generality is a kind of whole, comprehending many things within it, like parts.
Aristotle.
#34. Far be it from me, my dear sister, to depreciate such pleasures. They would doubtless be congenial with the generality of female minds. But I confess they would have no charms for me. I should infinitely prefer a book.
Jane Austen
#35. We shall be less apt to admire what this World calls Great, shall nobly despise those Trifles the generality of Men set their Affections on, when we know that there are a multitude of such Earths inhabited and adorned as Well as our own.
Christiaan Huygens
#36. With the latitude of unbounded scurrility, it is easy enough to attain the character of a wit, especially when it is considered how wonderfully pleasant it is to the generality of the public to see the folly of their acquaintance exposed by a third person.
Henry Fielding
#37. This idea that there is generality in the specific is of far-reaching importance.
Douglas R. Hofstadter
#38. Sometimes it occurs to me that the job of a serious cultural critic mostly consists in telling the generality of people that their opinions - on films, on books, on all manner of widgets, gadgets and even the latest electronic fidgets - simply aren't up to scratch.
Will Self
#39. The philosopher seeks a generality beyond the boundaries of science; he attempts to frame a comprehensive and coherent framework of ideas within which the partial results of science may become more intelligible.
William Barrett
#40. I have analyzed the peculiarity of cultural capital, which we should in fact call informational capital to give the notion its full generality, and which itself exists in three forms, embodied, objectified, or institutionalized.
Pierre Bourdieu
#41. I am only conscious of any satisfaction in Scientific Reading or thinking when it rounds off into a poetical generality and vagueness.
Wilfred Owen
#42. God is basic Fact. He must not be thought of as a featureless generality. He is the most concrete thing there is.
C.S. Lewis
#43. One character all messages had in common was vague generality. "Fly away with me," a tussie-mussie might suggest, but never "Meet me at the railway depot at six-thirty.
Geraldine Adamich Laufer
#44. The opinion I have of the generality of women
who appear to me as children to whom I would rather give a sugar plum than my time, forms a barrier against matrimony which I rejoice in.
John Keats
#45. All that is alive tends toward color, individuality, specificity, effectiveness and opacity. All that is done with life inclines toward knowledge, abstraction, generality transfiguration and transparency.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#46. Fatalism accounts for life as a whole. Whatever happens can be fit within the large generality of individuation, or my journey, or growth. Fatalism comforts, for it raises no questions. There's no need to examine just how events fit in.
James Hillman
#47. The source of all great mathematics is the special case, the concrete example. It is frequent in mathematics that every instance of a concept of seemingly generality is, in essence, the same as a small and concrete special case.
Paul Halmos
#48. Good general theory does not search for the maximum generality, but for the right generality.
Saunders Mac Lane
#49. That plenty should produce either covetousness or prodigality is a perversion of providence; and yet the generality of men are the worse for their riches.
William Penn
#50. The generality of men are so accustomed to judge of things by their senses that, because the air is indivisible, they ascribe but little to it, and think it but one remove from nothing.
Robert Boyle
#51. We meet With few utterly dull and stupid souls: the sublime and transcendent are still fewer; the generality of mankind stand between these two extremes: the interval is filled with multitudes of ordinary geniuses, but all very useful, and the ornaments and supports of the commonwealth.
Jean De La Bruyere
#52. It seems to be a universal generality that while the old want to reminisce, the young are too busy living to bother.
Doc Sanborn
#53. We have penetrated far less deeply into the regularities obtaining within the realm of living things, but deeply enough nevertheless to sense at least the rule of fixed necessity ... what is still lacking here is a grasp of the connections of profound generality, but not a knowledge of order itself.
Albert Einstein
#54. When I go about my own politics, I meet Tea Party supporters who I can work with in Congress, that I find common ground with. I find Tea Party supporters who won't let me get a sentence out without judging me. To say that there is a 'Tea Party supporter' is a gross generality.
Cory Booker
#55. The "sharp female newly-born, and called La Guillotine," was hardly known to him, or to the generality of people, by name.
Charles Dickens
#56. It is a novel constructed like a poem, where each character is only exceptional because if the hyperbolic manner in which he represents generality.
Victor Hugo
#57. For I am verily persuaded the generality of preachers talk of an unknown and unfelt Christ; and the reason why congregations have been so dead is, because they have had dead men preaching to them.
Gilbert Tennent
#58. As for methods I have sought to give them all the rigour that one requires in geometry, so as never to have recourse to the reasons drawn from the generality of algebra.
Augustin-Louis Cauchy
#59. I have never had any great esteem for the generality of the fair sex, and my only consolation for being of that gender has been the assurance it gave me of never being married to any one among them.
Mary Wortley Montagu
#60. Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness.
E. T. Bell
#61. To lead means to direct and to exact, and no man dares do either - he might be unpopular. What authority we are given now is a trinity: the grin, the generality, and God (the Word).
Marya Mannes
#62. It is certain that the easy and obvious philosophy will always, with the generality of mankind, have preference above the accurate.
David Hume
#63. Philosophy is explicitness, generality, orientation and assessment. That which one would insinuate, thereof one must speak.
Ernest Gellner
#64. Even before string theory, especially as physics developed in the 20th century, it turned out that the equations that really work in describing nature with the most generality and the greatest simplicity are very elegant and subtle.
Edward Witten
#65. The generality of virtuous women are like hidden treasures, they are safe only because nobody has sought after them.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#66. Since the generality of persons act from impulse, much more than from principle, men are neither so good nor so bad as we are apt to think them.
Augustus Hare
#67. The generality of time, of a family of times, is derived from the fact that all these times are enveloped in a process of nature.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#68. If anything is to exist at all, then the Original Thing must be, not a principle nor a generality, much less an 'ideal' or a 'value', but an utterly concrete fact.
C.S. Lewis
#69. To the generality of men you cannot give a stronger hint for them to impose upon you than by imposing upon yourself.
Henry Fielding
#70. My potential salvation ... must remain an unswerving commitment to treat generality only as it emerges from little things that arrest us and open our eyes with "aha"
while direct, abstract, learned assaults upon generalities usually glaze them over.
Stephen Jay Gould
#71. Just as a chemist "isolates" a substance from contaminations that distort his view of its nature and effects, so the work of art purifies significant appearance. It presents abstract themes in their generality, but not reduced to diagrams.
Rudolf Arnheim
#72. I think there is a blossom about me of something more distinguished than the generality of mankind.
James Boswell
#73. One feature which will probably most impress the mathematician accustomed to the rapidity and directness secured by the generality of modern methods is the deliberation with which Archimedes approaches the solution of any one of his main problems.
Thomas Little Heath
#74. Don't become a wandering generality. Be a meaningful specific.
Zig Ziglar
#75. Because all of biology is connected, one can often make a breakthrough with an organism that exaggerates a particular phenomenon, and later explore the generality.
Thomas R. Cech
#76. Are you a meaningful specific or a wandering generality ?
Zig Ziglar
#77. Praying anywhere" can easily become "praying nowhere", just as "praying anytime" can easily become "praying at no time". Everything in general becomes nothing in particular".
Peter Kreeft
#78. In the natural sciences, and particularly in chemistry, generalities must come after the detailed knowledge of each fact and not before it.
Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac
