Quotes About Generalization

I want to be very careful about judging and how much to generalize about the use of media being pathological. For some people, it's a temptation and a pathology; for others, it's a lifeline.

The tendency of the casual mind is to pick out or stumble upon a sample which supports or defies its prejudices, and then to make it the representative of a whole class.

All we talk about is 'Islamic terrorism.' If the two words are associated for long enough it's obviously going to have an effect on how people think about Muslims.

Your father means that you used a very generalized word, so meaningless that it's become almost obsolete," his mother explained carefully.

What's good about Americans, if I can generalize a little, is that they have a kind of open-hearted innocence. And what's not so good is that they can't imagine any world outside the States, or any value system different than their own.

I hate the English--they are coarse, like every nation that swills beer.

The problem with looking at so much history from such a distance is that everything gets so crowded. Things are complicated in every period — you step back too far to get a generalised picture and you lose all the important, deciding details. Zoom in too far to get the detail and you'll get lost in complexity and never find your way out.

Granted the exceptions, he agreed that all Englishwomen are haughty and venal.

There's always something fishy about the French.

Kant taught us that we should follow just those rules of conduct that we would want everybody to follow. Few find this generalization of The Golden Rule a great help.

Words like "everyone" are often used as if "everyone" can afford a new television, celebrates Christmas, can walk up stairs, is married or wants to be, can read, gets enough to eat, worries about a sunburn, and so on. Pseudogenerics are thought to include everyone because the people who use them are thinking only of themselves and their immediate world.

As the legal scholar Frederick Schauer has observed, "painting with a broad brush" is "an often inevitable and frequently desirable dimension of our decision-making lives.

Another characteristic of mathematical thought is that it can have no success where it cannot generalize.

The historians criticized a tendency, as they phrased it, to too rapid generalization. Other people blamed my method; and those who complimented me were those who understood me least.

There are always exceptions to every generalization. [A Christian Epilogue]

Our historic imagination is at best slightly developed. We generalise and idealise the past egregiously. We set up little toys to stand as symbols for centuries and the complicated lives of countless individuals.

People are quick to pigeonhole you.

It is always dangerous to generalize, but the American people, while infinitely generous, are a hard and strong race and, but for the few cemeteries I have seen, I am inclined to think they never die.

At the end of the day, I feel like it's a mistake to generalize that all men are the same.

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

Another maladaptive communication pattern is overgeneralization. It refers to the tendency to draw global conclusions in response to isolated events.

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

The death camps seem easier to comprehend if we put them all into the basket of one vast generalization, which the term "death camps" implies, but in the process we mythologize or trivialize them.

By contrast, inductive logic usually (though not always) goes from the lesser to the greater. "I have five friends who have white beards; all five are over fifty years of age; therefore all men with white beards are over fifty years of age.