On Generalization (Unsourced)

"Facts are facts and it is from facts that we make our generalizations, from the little to the great, and it is wrong for a stranger to the facts he handles to generalize from them to other generalizations." (Charles Schuchert)

"Generalization is necessary to the advancement of knowledge; but particularity is indispensable to the creations of the imagination." (Thomas B Macaulay)

"Generalizations would be excellent things if we could be persuaded to part with them as easily as we formed them. They might then be used like the shifting hypotheses in certain operations of exact science, by help of which we may gradually approximate nearer and nearer to the truth." (Henry De la Beche)

"In these days of rapid scientific progress there is a tendency to accept the facts of nature, as at present known, without glancing back at the slow and difficult stages by which the knowledge of these facts has been arrived at. Yet such a retrospect is by no means unprofitable, since it warns us that hasty generalizations upon insufficient data retard rather than advance the progress of knowledge, and that the theories of the day must not be accepted as necessarily expressing absolute truths." (Archibald Garrod)

"Men are more apt to be mistaken in their generalizations than in their particular observations." (Niccolo Machiavelli)

"No one sees further into a generalization than his own knowledge of detail extends." (William James)

"Once we learn to expect theories to collapse and to be supplanted by more useful generalizations, the collapsing theory becomes not the gray remnant of a broken today, but the herald of a new and brighter tomorrow." (Isaac Asimov)

"Philosophy is more often the systematization of the prejudices of philosophers than the systematization of nature. Distrust all generalizations: stick to the concrete." (Epifanio de los Santos)

"So far as a theory is formed in the generalization of natural appearances, that theory must be just, although it may not be perfect, as having comprehended every appearance; that is to say, a theory is not perfect until it be founded upon every natural appearance; in which case, those appearances will be explained by the theory." (William Huggins)