Generalization Quotes - Page 4

• Particular facts are never scientific; only generalization can establish science.

  Claude Bernard

  Facts, Particular

  1865 An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, vol.1, ch.1, section 3 (translated by H C Greene).

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• 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

  Expression, Analysis, Tools

  "Notation as a Tool of Thought". Cvommunications of the ACM, 23 (8), (pp. 444 - 465), August 1980.

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• ( ...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

  Philosophy, Sticks, Prejudice

  "Don Pañong - Genius" by A.V.H. Hartendorp, Philippine Magazine, p. 211, September 1929.

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• 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

  Writing, Apology, Race

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• 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

  Average, Church, May

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• 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

  Believe, Historical, Atheism

  Barbara W. Tuchman (2011). “Practicing History: Selected Essays”, p.34, Random House

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• Travelers are much at the mercy of phrases ... vast generalizations formulate in their exposed brains.

  Virginia Woolf

  Brain, Phrases, Mercy

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• Happiness is a specific. Misery is a generalization. People usually know exactly why they are happy. They very rarely know why they are miserable.

  Jeanette Winterson

  People, Misery, Miserable

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• Newton's great generalization, which he called the "third law of motion," was that "Action and reaction are always equal to each other;" and that law has been one of the most pregnant of all truths about the mystery of force;--one of the brightest windows through which modern eyes have looked into the world of Nature.

  Phillips Brooks

  Eye, Law, World

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• 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.

  Peter De Vries

  Eye, Vanity, People

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• What distinguishes the historian from the collector of historical facts is generalization.

  Edward Hallett Carr

  History, Historical, Facts

  Edward Hallett Carr (1962). “What Is History?: The George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures Delivered in the University of Cambridge January-March 1961”

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• It is, I believe, justifiable to make the generalization that anything an organic chemist can synthesize can be made without him. All he does is increase the probability that given reactions will 'go.' So it is quite reasonable to assume that given sufficient time and proper conditions, nucleotides, amino acids, proteins, and nucleic acids will arise by reactions that, though less probable, are as inevitable as those by which the organic chemist fulfills his predictions. So why not self-duplicating virus-like systems capable of further evolution?

  George Wells Beadle

  Believe, Science, Self

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• The first man who said "fire burns" was employing scientific method, at any rate if he had allowed himself to be burnt several times. This man had already passed through the two stages of observation and generalization. He had not, however, what scientific technique demands - a careful choice of significant facts on the one hand, and, on the other hand, various means of arriving at laws otherwise than my mere generalization.

  Bertrand Russell

  Mean, Science, Men

  "The Scientific Outlook".

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• Color is crucial in painting, but it is very hard to talk about. There is almost nothing you can say that holds up as a generalization, because it depends on too many factors: size, modulation, the rest of the field, a certain consistency that color has with forms, and the statement you're trying to make.

  Roy Lichtenstein

  Color, Consistency, Trying

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• [This] may prove to be the beginning of some embracing generalization, which will throw light, not only on radioactive processes, but on elements in general and the Periodic Law.... Chemical homogeneity is no longer a guarantee that any supposed element is not a mixture of several of different atomic weights, or that any atomic weight is not merely a mean number.

  Frederick Soddy

  Mean, Science, Light

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• In the field one has to face a chaos of facts, some of which are so small that they seem insignificant; others loom so large that they are hard to encompass with one synthetic glance. But in this crude form they are not scientific facts at all; they are absolutely elusive, and can be fixed only by interpretation, by seeing them sub specie aeternitatis, by grasping what is essential in them and fixing this. Only laws and generalizations are scientific facts, and field work consists only and exclusively in the interpretation of the chaotic social reality, in subordinating it to general rules.

  Bronislaw Malinowski

  Science, Reality, Law

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• I am bad at cultural generalizations but I would venture to say that by a wide margin there is less hypocrisy about sex in France than in America.

  Frederick Wiseman

  Sex, America, Hypocrisy

  Source: www.hollywoodchicago.com

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• 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

  Differences, Decision, Investing

  George Soros (1994). “The Alchemy of Finance: Reading the Mind of the Market”, p.14, John Wiley & Sons

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• 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

  Inspiration, Creativity, Science

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• 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

  Ideas, Perfection, Mind

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• As a piece of writing, The Elementary Particles feels like a bad, self-conscious pastiche of Camus, Foucault and Bret Easton Ellis. And as a philosophical tract, it evinces a fiercely nihilistic, anti-humanistic vision built upon gross generalizations and ridiculously phony logic. It is a deeply repugnant read.

  Michiko Kakutani

  Philosophical, Writing, Self

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• 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

  Thinking, Democracy, Way

  Trevanian (2011). “Shibumi”, p.198, Hachette UK

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• The principle of science, the definition, almost, is the following: The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific "truth." But what is the source of knowledge? Where do the laws that are to be tested come from? Experiment, itself, helps to produce these laws, in the sense that it gives us hints. But also needed is imagination to create from these hints the great generalizations--to guess at the wonderful, simple, but very strange patterns beneath them all, and then to experiment to check again whether we have made the right guess.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Science, Math, Simple

  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.45, Basic Books

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• 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

  Hope, Math, Thinking

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• Most people traffic in abstractions and generalizations because they are grossly incompetent at culturing their intuition or powers of evidency, refining it to grasp the Thisness (Haecceitas) of what is before them. Thinking is like a Stradivarius that has more potential variations in how it is played than any human can finitely perform or capture.

  Kenny Smith

  Philosophy, Thinking, People

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