Quotes on Generalization

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.

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

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

It is reckless to make broad generalizations about any group of people.

It is time, therefore, to abandon the superstition that natural science cannot be regarded as logically respectable until philosophers have solved the problem of induction. The problem of induction is, roughly speaking, the problem of finding a way to prove that certain empirical generalizations which are derived from past experience will hold good also in the future.

Pay attention to minute particulars. Take care of the little ones. Generalization and abstraction are the plea of the hypocrite, scoundrel, and knave.

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

Crude classifications and false generalizations are the curse of the organized life.

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

No generalization is wholly true—not even this one.

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.

There is an old saying, or should be, that it is a wise economist who recognizes the scope of his own generalizations.

An idea is always a generalization, and generalization is a property of thinking. To generalize means to think.

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.

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.