Every generalization is false, including this one.
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This has also been attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Winston Churchill, George Barnard Shaw and Douglas MacArthur.Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain)
» Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) - all quotes »
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.
Buckminster Fuller
A single observation that is inconsistent with some generalization points to the falsehood of the generalization, and thereby 'points to itself'.
Ian Hacking
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
Of what violences, murders, depredations, have not the epic poets, from all antiquity, been the occasion, by propagating false honour, false glory, and false religion?
Samuel Richardson
Clemens, Samuel Langhorne (Mark Twain)
Clement of Alexandria
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