Generalization Quotes - Page 2

• The museum spreads its surfaces everywhere, and becomes an untitled collection of generalizations that mobilize the eye.

  Robert Smithson

  Eye, Artist, Museums

  20 Copy quote

• Given a thimbleful of [dramatic] facts we rush to make generalizations as large as a tub.

  Gordon Allport

  Tubs, Facts, Dramatic

  18 Copy quote

• 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

  Men, Thinking, Networking

  "Madeleine Albright on Barriers Broken and Barriers that Remain". The Wall Street Journal, www.wsj.com. May 07, 2012.

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• The English have all the material requisites for the revolution. What they lack is the spirit of generalization and revolutionary ardour.

  Karl Marx

  Revolution, Spirit, Materials

  "Challenge to Karl Marx, Volume 25". Book by John Kenneth Turner (p. 219), 1941.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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 Eliot Morison

  Mind, Synthesis, Reputation

  Samuel Eliot Morison (1953). “By Land and by Sea: Essays and Addresses”, New York : Knopf

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.

  Anatole Broyard

  Home, Aphorism, Particular

  "Wisdom of Aphorisms". New York Times, April 30, 1983.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Psychology, Study, Prison

  25 Copy quote

• 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

  Twenties, Textbooks, Four

  28 Copy quote

• There are no generalizations in American politics that vested selfishness cannot cut through.

  John Gunther

  Cutting, Selfishness, American Politics

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Change, Taken, Character

  Barbara Ehrenreich (1990). “WORST YEARS OF OUR LIVES”, Pantheon

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Wine, Life Is, Found

  Richard P. Feynman, Robert B. Leighton, Matthew Sands (2015). “The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. I: The New Millennium Edition: Mainly Mechanics, Radiation, and Heat”, p.118, Basic Books

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Math, Science, Analogies

  7 Copy quote

• A single observation that is inconsistent with some generalization points to the falsehood of the generalization, and thereby 'points to itself'.

  Ian Hacking

  Observation, Inconsistent, Falsehood

  Ian Hacking (2006). “The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference”, p.34, Cambridge University Press

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.

  Ezra Pound

  History, Literature, Checks

  ABC of Reading (1934) ch. 1

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Doubt

  Alfred North Whitehead (2010). “Process and Reality”, p.208, Simon and Schuster

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Romance, Challenges, Might

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Good teaching is creating really interesting generalizations out of war stories.

  Derek Bok

  War, Teaching, Creating

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Joseph Epstein

  Book, People, Soul

  7 Copy quote

• To generalize on women is dangerous. To specialize in them is infinitely worse.

  Rudolph Valentino

  Women, Dangerous, Women Bashing

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

  31 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Historical, Ignorant, Judgment

  "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf". Camille Paglia, "Arion", Third Series, Volume 1, No. 2, Spring 1991.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• An extra-terrestrial philosopher, who had watched a single youth up to the age of twenty-one and had never come across any other human being, might conclude that it is the nature of human beings to grow continually taller and wiser in an indefinite progress towards perfection; and this generalization would be just as well founded as the generalization which evolutionists base upon the previous history of this planet.

  Bertrand Russell

  Science, History, Perfection

  Bertrand Russell (2015). “Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays: Top Philosophy Collections”, p.66, 谷月社

  51 Copy quote

  Show source

• In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations!

  Anton Chekhov

  Character, Psychology, Essentials

  11 Copy quote

• 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 Safak

  Identity Politics, Water, Fiction

  "The politics of fiction". TED Talk, www.ted.com. July 2010.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Hate generalizes; love specifies. Or: The movements of hatred are toward generalization; love's movements are toward specification.

  Robin Morgan

  Hate, Hatred, Movement

  Robin Morgan (2014). “The Word of a Woman: Feminist Dispatches”, p.84, Open Road Media

  21 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Numbers, Variation, Theory

  7 Copy quote