Generalization Quotes

“To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones

“My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive.”
― Charles Darwin

“All science ever did was measure a teensy sliver of the universe and assume that everything else behaved the same way.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

“Each category is generalized to the greatest possible extent, so that it eventually loses all specificity and is reabsorbed by all the other categories. When everything is political, nothing is political anymore, the word itself is meaningless. When everything is sexual, nothing is sexual any more, and sex loses its determinants. When everything is aesthetic, nothing is beautiful or ugly any more, and art itself disappears.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“I feel obliged to explain that I thought for quite a few years that I had lost my daughter to pirates during the Phoenix incident," she said. "The first thing anyone knew, the legitimate colony was gone and heavyworlders had moved in. I harbored a very deep resentment that they were living on that bright and shiny new planet while I grieved for my daughter. It's affected my good judgment somewhat ever since." Lunzie swallowed. "I apologize for indulging myself with such a shockingly biased generalization. It's the pirates I should hate, and I do."
[...]
"But I'm learning. I'm learning. I'm especially learning [...] I'm gradually learning to accept each person as an individual, and not as just a representative of their subgroup or species. Each one is individual to his, her, itself and can't be lumped in with his, her or its peer group.”
― Anne McCaffrey, The Death of Sleep

“Both the destruction and the preservation of capitalism are meaningless slogans, but these slogans are supported by real organizations. Corresponding to each empty abstraction there is an actual human group, and any abstraction of which this is not true remains harmless.”
― simone weil, Simone Weil: An Anthology

“Language necessarily involves bringing any particular under more and more general and universal labels. That’s what conceptualization is all about: reducing particular things to fewer and fewer generalizations and universals, until, ultimately, reality is reduced to just one universal, the supreme concept that explains everything. This one concept is the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR). The whole point of concepts is to reach more and more general and universal levels until we ultimately arrive at one concept – the ultimate universal which explains the whole of reality. That concept is the PSR.”
― Thomas Stark, The Stairway to Consciousness: The Birth of Self-Awareness from Unconscious Archetypes