Generalizing Quotes

“Random search for data on ... off-chance is hardly scientific. A questionnaire on 'Intellectual Immoralities' was circulated by a well-known institution. 'Intellectual Immorality No. 4' read: 'Generalizing beyond one's data'. [Wilder Dwight] Bancroft asked whether it would not be more correct to word question no. 4 'Not generalizing beyond one's data.”

“To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. The grass, the soil—everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble. You feel an intense, out-of-the-skin awareness of your living self—your truest self, the human being you want to be and then become by the force of wanting it. In the midst of evil you want to be a good man. You want decency. You want justice and courtesy and human concord, things you never knew you wanted. There is a kind of largeness to it, a kind of godliness. Though it’s odd, you’re never more alive than when you’re almost dead. You recognize what’s valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what’s best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost. At the hour of dusk you sit at your foxhole and look out on a wide river turning pinkish red, and at the mountains beyond, and although in the morning you must cross the river and go into the mountains and do terrible things and maybe die, even so, you find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not.”

“Power of generalizing gives men so much the superiority in mistake over the dumb animals.”

“The generalizing writer is like the passionate drunk, stumbling into your house mumbling: I know I'm not being clear, exactly, but don't you kind of feel what I'm feeling?”

“I've always been slightly hesitant about generalizing movies made by men and women being different in their nature; I think movies by each director are different. Having said that, I think that it's kind of disgraceful that there aren't more female directors.”

“Is it that bad, Mrs. Bowen?" Clement asked.Emily shook her head. "Gertrude's been hurt and so she's generalizing. It's a pretty good country on the whole, and the people in it, too. We have our faults and they may be glaring, and we have individuals we may not be proud of, but take us by and large we'll stick our necks our for something we believe in, and that in itself may be a fault, but it's one I like.""Bravo," Abe said.”

“There is today an extraordinary interest with the data of modern experience per se. Our absorption in our contemporary historical state is very high right now. It's not altogether unlike a similar situation in seventeenth century Holland where wealthy merchants wanted their portraits done with all their blemishes included. It is the height of egotism in a sense to think even one's blemishes are of significance. So today Americans seem to want their writers to reveal all their weaknesses their meannesses to celebrate their very confusions. And they want it in the most direct possible way - they want it served up neat as it were without the filtering and generalizing power of fiction.”

“Winning and losing is not an external game. It is an internal battle over telling yourself the truth vs. lies regarding why you haven’t stepped into the life you dreamed of.”