Generalize Quotes

“Generally speaking, I try not to generalize.”

— Addison C. Arthur

“That streetside tree is obscuring the air. Cut it down. Haul it in for questioning. There are secrets within that foliage. You might want to separate the branches in different rooms and apply some elementary game theory."
"Question a plant?"
"Trees have a will too, just like people. We have to know it's purpose. Read Schopenhauer."
"Schopenwho?"
"He was the only authentic German. You might like him. Being a police officer, you're undoubtedly familiar with the need to put an end to the lives of the perverse when sex crimes go too far. Now just generalize that necessity to every human being.”

— Benson Bruno

“Human beings ... are far too prone to generalize from one instance. The technical word for this, interestingly enough, is superstition.”

— Francis Crick

“As soon as they leave, Leon says to me: I disagree, sir. There are people who aren't insane, and I'm one of them. People who generalize are mentally ill.”

— Milton Rokeach

“It's impossible to generalize about sexuality - even one's own. The only way to keep it pure is to keep it unspoken. Keep it out of words. Words are not where sexuality lives. Without privacy, there is no ecstasy.”

— Erica Jong

“[Stephenson] believes that, as research becomes more airborne and more office-bound, we generalize more and more, and we lose the vast range of wolf experience; in fact, there are soft wolves and hard wolves, kind wolves and malicious wolves, soldiers and nurses, philosophers and bullies.”

— Peter Steinhart

“Since each story presents its own technical problems, obviously one can't generalize about them on a two-times-two-equals-four basis. Finding the right form for your story is simply to realize the most natural way of telling the story. The test of whether or not a writer has defined the natural shape of his story is just this: After reading it, can you imagine it differently, or does it silence your imagination and seem to you absolute and final? As an orange is final. As an orange is something nature has made just right.”

— Truman Capote

“There is some blogging jerk out there who feels he can generalize his way to validity.”

— Neil Young

“At all ages, if [fantasy and myth] is used well by the author and meets the right reader, it has the same power: to generalize while remaining concrete, to present in palpable form not concepts or even experiences but whole classes of experience, and to throw off irrelevancies. Bat at its best it can do more; it can give us experiences we have never had and thus, instead of 'commenting on life,' can add to it.”

— C.S. Lewis

“To generalize is to be an idiot, said Blake. Perhaps he went too far. But to generalize is to be a finite mind. Generalities are the lenses with which our intellects have to manage.”

— C.S. Lewis

“I don't like to generalize but I've had nothing but bad experiences with Mexican food in Europe.”

— Ezra Koenig

“Every man is different. You can't generalize with men; you have to find out what your man wants. You have to listen to him when he's telling you what he wants, because a lot of times they're telling you, but you're not listening.”

— Karrine Steffans

“To think is to ignore the differences, to generalize, to abstract.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

“I know it's bad to generalize, but when you think about billionaires, you just think this guy is going to walk into a room and just demand things to be a certain way.”

— Sabrina Bryan

“Most people generalize whatever they did, and say that was the strategy that made it work.”

— Ben Silbermann

“So when you do your family tree and Margaret Cho does hers, and ... Wanda Sykes and John Legend ... we're adding to the database that scholars can then draw from to generalize about the complexity of the American experience. And that's the contribution that family trees make to broader scholarship.”

— Henry Louis Gates

“The theme of the diary is always the personal, but it does not mean only a personal story: it means a personal relationship to all things and people. The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic; I never generalize, intellectualise. I see, I hear, I feel. These are my primitive elements of discovery.
Music, dance, poetry and painting are the channels for emotion. It is through them that experience penetrates our bloodstream.”

— Anaïs Nin

“I don't know anybody who walks through life all the time in the doldrums, constantly serious and morose. But that's become what we generalize as drama.”

— Matt Bomer

“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.”

— Margot Asquith

“It's a very generous culture, American culture. I know you can't generalize 300 million people, but everyone I've met here has been so lovely to me.”

— Jacki Weaver

“I definitely don't generalize and put everybody in the same cup of water.”

— Cole Hauser

“I don't want to over generalize, but I believe that women are typically drawn to leadership styles that focus on consensus building, effective listening and working in teams. That's certainly been my leadership style, and I think it's been very successful.”

— Margaret Hamburg

“An observation that people who live permanently in an adoptive country tend to progressively generalize the bad and particularize the good, that is, attribute the bad traits in people they encounter to the national trait of the natives, and the good things to the individual.
This holds equally well for French people living in the U.S. as it does for Americans living in France.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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

— Jack Schwartz

“We couldn't generalize on the people. Some of them were known to be tough guys and they didn't say much, but some of them were kind of soft-headed, but they did that. That was an East German film.”

— James Stockdale

“What is important is to treat everyone like an individual and learning not to generalize autism. With autism, people make assumptions, but it's very broad, and everyone's so different. You have to treat each person as an individual.”

— Nikki Reed

“All historians generalize from particulars. And often, if you look at a historian's footnotes, the number of examples of specific cases is very, very small.”

— Henry Louis Gates

“I think there's a tendency for actors like myself, and I don't mean to generalize myself, but I've played 'men's men,' if you will, characters that are simmering rage and calculated. There's a trend not to play anything that is opposed to that.”

— Idris Elba

“I realize that I'm generalizing here, but as is often the case when I generalize, I don't care.”

— Dave Barry

“Theory of mind postulates that, even though these cannot be directly observed, we readily impute mental states to others (and also to ourselves, since the bedrock proposal is that we understand our own mental states well enough to generalize from them). And so we constantly infer someone else's intentions, thoughts, knowledge, lack of knowledge, doubts, desires, beliefs, guesses, promises, preferences, purposes, and many, many more things in order to behave as social creatures in the world.”

— Karen Joy Fowler

“Because the vast majority of leaders are men, it is not possible to generalize from any one example. But the dearth of female leaders causes one woman to be viewed as representative of her entire gender. And because people often discount and dislike female leaders, these generalizations are often critical. This is not just unfair to the individuals but reinforces the stigma that successful women are unlikeable.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

“I exaggerate. I oversimplify. I generalize. But there's no cynicism here. American poetry is a mess. Long live American poetry.”

— David Biespiel

“You can go back and try to generalize, but then you end up saying things that all editors say about everything that ever gets published. Something about voice, about urgency, about actually having a story to tell.”

— Lorin Stein

“To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract.”

— Guy Deutscher

“My art tends toward the literary. My pictures tend toward the outskirts of painting: But why generalize? It is possible to realize one thing or another, according to the impressions gained from one point of view or another. But it is too difficult to make a general rule.”

— James Ensor

“I've changed over my writing life. If I can generalize, I would say that the more recent poems - believe it or not - are more pointedly political; although, if the earlier poems were more existential, they were still political; though, in their own way, had a complicated presence.”

— Gerald Stern

“Life is too short so we must generalize.”

— Gordon Allport

“It is difficult to generalize about Islam. To begin with, the word itself is commonly used with two related but distinct meanings, as the equivalents both of Christianity, and Christendom. In the one sense, it denotes a religion, as system of beliefs and worship; in the other, the civilization that grew up and flourished under the aegis of that religion. The word Islam thus denotes more than fourteen centuries of history, a billion and a third people, and a religious and cultural tradition of enormous diversity.”

— Bernard Lewis

“Before you generalize, formalize, and axiomatize there must be mathematical substance.”

— Hermann Weyl

“You perceive I generalize with intrepidity from single instances. It is the tourist's custom.”

— Mark Twain

“Early fear was felt cellularly and was indeed real. Defensive postures were necessary, but defenses generalize cellularly in adulthood and do not expire. It takes conscious work to undo them. Ironically, as long as we keep using defenses, we actually maintain the original force of the fear.”

— David Richo

“Sometimes when I generalize, I am saying, 'Let's pretend I am God,' and of course the other person argues that point endlessly. But I notice that if the other person takes a stand for himself and states his thoughts as his thoughts, I pay more attention to what he is saying and look deeper in myself.”

— Hugh Prather

“I don't believe in typecasting. Just because all my characters may come from the other side of the tracks doesn't mean they are all the same. You don't stereotype people and generalize people, everyone's different.”

— Michael K. Williams

“I would hate for people to generalize about every Haitian from something that one Haitian did, or a group of Haitians did.”

— Edwidge Danticat

“Our credulity is a part of the imperfection of our natures. It is inherent in us to desire to generalize, when we ought, on the contrary, to guard ourselves very carefully from this
tendency.”

— Napoleon Bonaparte

“But it is just this characteristic of simplicity in the laws of nature hitherto discovered which it would be fallacious to generalize, for it is obvious that simplicity has been a part cause of their discovery, and can, therefore, give no ground for the supposition that other undiscovered laws are equally simple.”

— Bertrand Russell

“It's hard to generalize about that subject because the women I've worked with have all been so different. But if there's one consistency, it might be that you do have to handle yourself differently on a set. Women can be more emotional - at least they sometimes show it more.”

— Kristen Stewart

“If you don't generalize you don't philosophize.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

“I am not one to generalize, but cartoonists, as a group, exhibit a level of social sophistication generally associated with pie fights. In high school, when the future lawyers were campaigning for class president, the future cartoonists were painstakingly altering illustrations in their history books so that Robert E. Lee appeared to be performing an illegal act with his horse.”

— Dave Barry

“Part of language design is perturbing the proposed feature in various directions to see how it might generalize in the future.”

— Larry Wall