Top 85 Quotes About Generalizations
#1. At the risk of descending to unscientific generalizations, 90 percent of Texans give the other 10 percent a bad name." - Attributed to John H. "Doc" Holliday
Mary Doria Russell
#2. I only have a Bachelor's Degree but I've had professors who have instilled this kind of academic rigor in me where I don't make any generalizations or closed statements. There always has to be room for interpretation.
Ayshay
#3. All generalizations, with the possible exception of this one, are false.
Kurt Godel
#4. 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
#5. Intellectuals ... regard over-simplification as the original sin of the mind and have no use for the slogans, the unqualified assertions and sweeping generalizations.
Aldous Huxley
#6. Identity politics divides us; fiction connects. One is interested in sweeping generalizations, the other in nuances. One draws boundaries, the other recognizes no frontiers. Identity politics is made of solid bricks; fiction is flowing water.
Elif Shafak
#7. There is a constant rush to judgment in Foucault. He is filled with specious generalizations, false categories, distortions, fudging, pretenses to knowledge in areas where he was ignorant. He had no ability whatsoever to distinguish among historical sources, where he makes terrible blunders.
Camille Paglia
#8. Mental models are deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures of images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action.
Peter Senge
#9. 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.
John Negroponte
#10. Only the great generalizations survive. The sharp words of the Declaration of Independence, lampooned then and since as 'glittering generalities,' have turned out blazing ubiquities that will burn forever and ever.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#11. Answers come after questions, not before. Answers answer questions in specific and pointed ways, not in sweeping generalizations.
Rosaria Champagne Butterfield
#12. Generalizations, like brooms, ought not to stand in a corner forever; they ought to sweep as a matter of course.
John Lukacs
#13. I feel like a lot of serious music lives in generalizations - 'Love is a flower,' 'The sky is so dark' - but comedy lives in specifics.
Rachel Bloom
#14. To fully express their feelings, women assume poetic license and use various superlatives, metaphors, and generalizations. Men mistakenly take these expressions literally. Because they misunderstand the intended meaning, they commonly react in an unsupportive manner.
John Gray
#15. People who like quotes love meaningless generalizations
Graham Greene
#16. Any of us who've been newspapermen for a long time hate generalizations.
Pete Hamill
#17. Beware of generalizations about any faith because they sometimes amount to the religious equivalent of racial profiling. Hinduism contained both Gandhi and the fanatic who assassinated him.
Nicholas Kristof
#18. 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.
Colin Flaherty
#19. It is reckless to make broad generalizations about any group of people.
Roger Ebert
#20. Given a thimbleful of [dramatic] facts we rush to make generalizations as large as a tub.
Gordon W. Allport
#21. I think generalizations of any sort are dangerous. I'll say, if that is the case - right now it's an American issue.
Kerry Washington
#22. Sweeping generalizations are easy, but we are more alike than we are different. Our focus and interests may vary, or not, but to dismiss something as less relevant is a missed opportunity.
Deborah Stanish
#24. As a whole, humanity doesn't lend itself to generalizations. But as I see it, there are two types of people: the comprehensive-vision type and the limited-perspective type. Me, I seem to be the latter. Not that I ever had much problem justifying my limits. A person has to draw lines somewhere.
Haruki Murakami
#25. I like gross generalizations ... I also like disgusting specifics!
Josh Stern
#27. 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
#28. Not to make sweeping generalizations about men, but I can pretty well guess how this conversation would go down. Jack: Everything okay? You seem down in the mouth lately. Maxime: It is fine. Jack: Okay, just checking. See ya.
Jennifer Coburn
#29. 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
#30. Travelers are much at the mercy of phrases ... vast generalizations formulate in their exposed brains ...
Virginia Woolf
#31. I tried to write worse but it was no good; my generalizations came out as before, each more exquisite than the last. I grew discouraged.
Peter De Vries
#32. What I find in Aristotle is mainly a quite dull collection of generalizations, many of which seem impossible to justify in the light of modern knowledge,
Robert M. Pirsig
#33. Did you ever notice that most of us relate to our lives like we have no control or say over them? Especially in areas where we're not proud. We speak about ourselves like we're reporting on the weather, making sweeping generalizations...And boy do we ever believe our own 'forecasts.
Lauren Handel Zander
#35. Good teaching is creating really interesting generalizations out of war stories.
Derek Bok
#36. So, to sum up my room-clearing generalizations, men are in comedy to break rules.
Tina Fey
#37. 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
#38. I think one of the things you have to learn if you're going to create believable characters is never to make generalizations about groups of people.
Mark Haddon
#39. 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. Life wouldn't be easier or not easier. Aren't both generalizations logically impossible? Since there's no correlation, there can be no comparison.
Kobo Abe
#41. So far, we have been able to study only one evolving system and we cannot wait for interstellar flight to provide us with a second. If we want to discover generalizations about evolving systems, we will have to look at artificial ones.
John Maynard Smith
#42. I hate it when people throw big sweeping generalizations at you that you can't even begin to interpret.
Karen Marie Moning
#43. Crude classifications and false generalizations are the curse of the organized life.
H.G.Wells
#44. 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
#45. Generalizations about the "way women are" and estimates of what is appropriate for most women no longer justify denying opportunity to women whose talent and capacity place them outside the average description.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
#46. There are great people everywhere, and there are all kinds of exceptions to any generalizations, and it was a huge privilege for me to get to learn that.
Jenny Hoyston
#47. At each stage ... entirely new laws, concepts and generalizations are necessary, requiring inspiration and creativity to just as great a degree as in the previous one.
Poul Anderson
#48. 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
#49. Men are more apt to be mistaken in their generalizations than in their particular observations.
Niccolo Machiavelli
#50. Everyone in America (according to my generalizations) is a potential millionaire waiting for his or her big break. I was astonished lately to realize that Americans are definitely believing in and planning for the future, despite the fact that they elected Ronald Reagan twice.
Roseanne Barr
#52. 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
#53. As is always the case, events do not conform easily to the generalizations historians produce to try to make sense of the past.
Glenn Porter
#54. The highest of generalizations is the synergetic integration of truth and love.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#55. 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?
CrimethInc.
#56. ( ... philosophy is more often the systematization of the prejudices of philosophers than the systematization of nature.) Distrust all generalizations: stick to the concrete.
Epifanio De Los Santos
#57. There are no generalizations in American politics that vested selfishness cannot cut through.
John Gunther
#58. The most obvious purpose of college education is to help students acquire information and knowledge by acquainting them with facts, theories, generalizations, principles, and the like. This purpose scarcely requires justification.
Derek Bok
#59. 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
#60. Economic science concerns itself primarily with theoretical and empirical generalizations about the behavior of individuals, institutions, markets, and national economies. Most academic research falls in this category.
Ben Bernanke
#61. Aspiring to these wide generalizations, the analysis of quadratic functions soars to a pitch from whence it may look proudly down on the feeble and vain attempts of geometry proper to rise to its level or to emulate it in its flights.
James Joseph Sylvester
#62. The idea of a character dichotomy between women and men has been overwhelmingly, decisively, refuted. The broad psychological similarity of men and women as groups can be regarded, on the volume of evidence supporting it, as one of the best-established generalizations in all the human sciences.
Raewyn W. Connell
#63. There is an old saying, or should be, that it is a wise economist who recognizes the scope of his own generalizations.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#64. The museum spreads its surfaces everywhere, and becomes an untitled collection of generalizations that mobilize the eye.
Robert Smithson
#65. In your 20s - and these are generalizations of course - I feel like I didn't care about as many things or as many people, or even myself, as much. There's more recklessness and more ruthlessness; you're not as considerate of how things land with other people I think.
Naomi Watts
#66. So often, generalizations don't apply to Catholic voters. Catholics are concerned about the war, the economy, about issues like abortion, issues pertaining to the budget and funding Medicaid and Medicare and what happens to the environment.
Bob Casey Jr.
#67. There is nothing particularly scientific about excessive caution. Science thrives on daring generalizations.
Lancelot Hogben
#68. Honestly, what can really be said about 'the Jewish people' as a whole? Is it not a lamentable stereotype to make large generalizations about all Jews, and to presume they all share the same political commitments?
Judith Butler
#69. There are always exceptions to every generalization.
[A Christian Epilogue]
John B. Cobb Jr.
#71. [T]he choice of human groupings for cultural comparisons is not a natural or scientific choice, but a political one.
Pascal Boyer
#73. As soon as they leave, Leon says to me: I disagree, sir. There are people who aren't insane, and I'm one of them. People who generalize are mentally ill.
Milton Rokeach
#74. Generally, there is a lot of truth value in stepping back, observing, then logically generalizing the extremes of what you see.
Criss Jami
#75. Chesterton had an incorrigible and persistent tendency to throw-the-baby-out-with-the-bathwater.
R. Alan Woods
#76. The curious thing about individuals is that their singularity always goes beyond any category or generalization in the book.
Haruki Murakami
#77. Out of ignorance or expediency we give all snowflakes the same name.
Marty Rubin
#78. Any general statement is like a cheque drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.
Ezra Pound
#80. MODERN PARENTS OF TWENTY FIRST CENTURY NEEDS SPIRITUAL BRAIN WASH WITH GREAT CLASSIC LITERATURE ACROSS THE GLOBE FIRST. NATURALLY,RESULTING OUR FUTURE GLOBAL DIRECORS(INDIVIDUAL CHILDREN) WILL RE-DESGN AND RE-DRAFT LIFE DIRECTION SOFT-WARE TO UP GRADE THEIR SOULS GOD SPIRITUALITY NEXT.
Various
#81. People who always arrive early aren't worth waiting for.
Crystal Woods
#82. I often wonder why the whole world is so prone to generalise. Generalisations are seldom if ever true and are usually utterly inaccurate.
Agatha Christie
#83. Come on, come on; you are pictures out of doors,
Bells in your parlours, wild cats in your kitchens,
Saints in your injuries, devils being offended,
Players in your housewifery, and housewives in your beds.
William Shakespeare
#84. The thing about stereotyping is it's usually just throwing rocks into a crowd hoping to hit somebody who deserves it.
Criss Jami
#85. 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
