A Quote by Mark Twain

Every generalization is dangerous, especially this one.

Mark Twain

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Dangerous Every Generalization

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Mark Twain
American - Writer
November 30, 1835 - April 21, 1910

The word generalization in literature usually means covering too much territory too thinly to be persuasive, let alone convincing. In science, however, a generalization means a principle that has been found to hold true in every special case.... The principle of leverage is a scientific generalization.

R. Buckminster Fuller

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

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

A single observation that is inconsistent with some generalization points to the falsehood of the generalization, and thereby 'points to itself'.

Ian Hacking

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

Generalizations, one is told, are dangerous. So is life, for that matter, and it is built up on generalization - from the earliest effort of the adventurer who dared to eat a second berry because the first had not killed him.

Freya Stark

Generalization, especially risky generalization, is one of the chief methods by which knowledge proceeds... Safe generalizations are usually rather boring. Delete that "usually rather." Safe generalizations are quite boring.

Joseph Epstein

I can't overlook any opponent because all fighters are dangerous. Every fighter is dangerous.

Brandon Rios

An extra-terrestrial philosopher, who had watched a single youth up to the age of twenty-one and had never come across any other human being, might conclude that it is the nature of human beings to grow continually taller and wiser in an indefinite progress towards perfection; and this generalization would be just as well founded as the generalization which evolutionists base upon the previous history of this planet.

Bertrand Russell

Even the recognition of an individual whom we see every day is only possible as the result of an abstract idea of him formed by generalization from his appearances in the past.

James G. Frazer

The first man who said "fire burns" was employing scientific method, at any rate if he had allowed himself to be burnt several times. This man had already passed through the two stages of observation and generalization. He had not, however, what scientific technique demands - a careful choice of significant facts on the one hand, and, on the other hand, various means of arriving at laws otherwise than my mere generalization.

Bertrand Russell

Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman-a rope over an abyss. A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting

Friedrich Nietzsche

Instinct told me it was dangerous. I could handle dangerous. Dangerous and me went back a long way. We did lunch when dangerous was in town.

Devon Monk

Unpleasant, even dangerous, qualities can be found in every nation and every individual: it is cruel to demand that the Jew be an exception. In him, these qualities may even be dangerous and revolting to an unusual degree; and perhaps the young stock-exchange Jew is altogether the most disgusting invention of mankind.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Substances like LSD, which give away a secret about the nature of the social game - the human game and what underlies it - are potentially dangerous, of course, like any good thing is. Electricity is dangerous, fire is dangerous, cars are dangerous, planes are dangerous, but not so dangerous as driving on the freeway. The only way to handle danger is to face it. If you start getting frightened of it, then you make it worse. Because you project onto it all kinds of bogeys and threats which don't exist in it at all.

Alan Watts

Black lives certainly do matter - that's one thing. But, it's just that in every profession, there are bad, as well as there are good. I think it's wrong to make cops - or any group - out to be the enemy based on a generalization. Stigmas and generalizations about groups are what get this world into such turmoil.

Reginald VelJohnson

An aphorism is a generalization, therefore not modern.

John Fowles

A Quote by Mark Twain

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