Quotes About Generalization

Fourth—and here's where the paradox arises—the generalization runs up against counterexamples in both directions. There are verbs that appear only with the prepositional dative: Goldie drove her minibus to the lake. *Goldie drove the lake her minibus.

The great threat we pose to each other is a fruit of our sublime ability to generalize.

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.

Avoid context and specifics; generalize and keep repeating the generalization.

No day passes without a Democratic politician, a left-wing commentator, or, if I may be excused a redundancy, a left-wing academic labeling Republicans and conservatives racist.

You've got the brain-washed, that's the Democrats, and the brain-dead, that's the Republicans!

No one knows 'men' as such, any more than anyone knows 'women,' and if they do generalise they're probably trying to hide their own ignorance. You might know one 'man,' yes, or even lots of individual 'men'.

I figure anytime you put an adjective before 'writer,' it's a way of dismissing the writer.

What public opinion permits us to judge and even to condemn are trends, or whole groups of people--the larger the better--in short, something so general that distinctions can no longer be made, names no longer named. Needless to add, this taboo applies doubly when the deeds or words of famous people or men in high position are being questioned.

An aphorism is a personal observation inflated into a universal truth, a private posing as a general.

Fashion is silly. Perhaps I should say fashion in general is silly. But then everything is, in general. If you talk about music in general, it's silly; about magazines, in general, they're silly.

On average, the Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese are more similar to each other and are different from Australians, Israelis and the Swedes, who in turn are similar to each other and are different from Nigerians, Kenyans, and Jamaicans.

Is it just women who do that?" she asked. "I hate to generalize, but how often do men act that way? Surrendering to another person because they're supposedly so gifted. I'm sure it happens, but we seem to hear about women doing it more. Do you think we're biologically more ready to serve?

The English are crooked as a nation and honest as individuals. The contrary is true of the French, who are honest as a nation and crooked as individuals.

For being the largest generation in American history, the Millennial generation inspires a ridiculous degree of overgeneralization.

The silliest questions are those seeking to be "deep" and/or "intelligent" and that, in fact, are absolutely hollow and stupid. For example: "What do you think is the situation of the Latin American intellectual?" What can I say in response to such generalities? My answer: "I do not know, nor do I care to know.

Women have no sympathy and my experience of women is almost as large as Europe.

It's slipped into usage with somepeople like ourselves, when they want a common, ugly term to label somebody.

When we say that men are taller than women, the words -on average- are implied. Pointing to the existence of your friend Rhonda, who really is quite tall, does not negate the statistical truth that, on average, men are still taller than women.

And so, you can do hundreds and hundreds of studies showing a general factor and just so long as you restrict your populations, your testing materials and the kinds of situations you look at, you can keep finding the same wrong thing again and again.

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.

The major problem with most attempts to predict a specific outcome, such as interviews, is decontextualization: the attempt takes place in a generalized environment, as opposed to the context in which a behavior or trait naturally occurs.

Prediction can never be absolutely valid and therefore science can never prove some generalization or even test a single descriptive statement and in that way arrive at final truth.

There was, for starters, the tendency of everyone who actually played the game to generalize wildly from his own experience. People always thought their own experience was typical when it wasn't.