Lady Mary Wortley Montagu - Mark Twain & Alexander Chase - Alexandre Dumas - George C Williams - Francis Crick - Agatha Christie - Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel - Jack Schwartz - Harris Hawthorne Wilder - Hans Reichenbach -
General notions are generally wrong. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, letter 28th March 1710
All generalisations are false, including this one. Mark Twain & Alexander Chase
All generalisations are dangerous, even this one. Alexandre Dumas the younger, attributed
Darwin based his theory on generalizations that were strictly empirical. You can go out and see that organisms do vary, that variations are inherited, and that every organism is capable of increasing its numbers in sufficiently favourable circumstances. George C Williams
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. Francis Crick
I often wonder why the whole world is so prone to generalise. Generalisations are seldom if ever true and are usually utterly inaccurate. Agatha Christie, Murder at the Vicarage
An idea is always a generalization, and generalization is a property of thinking. To generalize means to think. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Avoid context and specifics; generalize and keep repeating the generalization. Jack Schwartz
One of the grandest generalizations formulated by modern biological science is that of the continuity of life; the protoplasmic activity within each living body now on earth has continued without cessation from the remote beginnings of life on our planet, and from that period until the present no single organism has ever arisen save in the form of a bit of living protoplasm detached from a pre-existing portion; the eternal flame of life once kindled upon this earth has passed from organism to organism, and is still, going on existing and propagating, incarnated within the myriad animal and plant forms of everyday life. Harris Hawthorne Wilder, History of the Human Body 1919
The essence of knowledge is generalization. That fire can be produced by rubbing wood in a certain way is a knowledge derived by generalization from individual experiences; the statement means that rubbing wood in this way will always produce fire. The art of discovery is therefore the art of correct generalization ... The separation of relevant from irrelevant factors is the beginning of knowledge. Hans Reichenbach, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy, 1951