Generalizations Quotes

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

I hate facts. I always say the chief end of man is to form general propositions - adding that no general proposition is worth a damn.

Any of us who've been newspapermen for a long time hate generalizations.

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.

To assume that just because of someone's age or gender or whatever, that they don't pose a threat would be wrong.

I begin with the principle that all men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this.

Stereotypes abound when there is distance. They are an invention, a pretense that one knows when the steps that would make real knowing possible cannot be taken or are not allowed.

All generalizations are false, including this one.

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

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.

Making sweeping over-generalizations is classically un-American.

People think just because I'm from the Middle East, I'm an expert on the Middle East. So, like, I got a friend, like, any time the gas prices go up, he'll always ask my opinion about it.

The fool generalizes the particular; the nerd particularizes the general; ... the wise does neither.

I just don't believe in generalisations.

Sure there are a few good whites just as much as there are a few bad Blacks. However what we are concerned here with is group attitudes and group politics. The exception does not make a lie or the rule - it merely substantiates it.

We can no longer oversimplify. We can no longer build lazy and false stereotypes: Americans are like this, Russians are like that, a Jew behaves in such a way, a Negro thinks in a different way. The lazy generalities - 'You know how women are ... Isn't that just like a man?' The world cannot be understood from a single point of view.

People who like quotes love meaningless generalizations

It's fascinating that people, there's so many people now who will make judgments based on what you look like. I'm black. So I'm supposed to think a certain way. I'm supposed to have certain opinions. I don't do that. You don't create a box and put people in and then make a lot of generalizations about them.

I don't believe in stereotypes. Most of the time, stereotypes are just that.

When general observations are drawn from so many particulars as to become certain and indisputable, these are jewels of knowledge.

I've run into people who say, 'I know what you're like: You're a Boston guy.' That's so weird. This person who doesn't know anything about me thinks they know a lot because of the city I grew up in, which, to me, is a meaningless label. There are all kinds of people from Boston.

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.

It is very easy to make wild generalizations about Islam. All you have to do is read almost any issue of The New Republic and you'll see there the radical evil that's associated with Islam, the Arabs as having a depraved culture, and so forth. These are impossible generalizations to make in the United States about any other religious or ethnic group.

If particulars are to have meaning, there must be universals.

Men are more apt to be mistaken in their generalizations than in their particular observations.