Generic Quotes

Equity knows no difference of sex. In its vocabulary the word man must be understood in a generic, and not in a specific sense. (Herbert Spencer)
[I am] dealing not with the particular anecdote, but rather with the Spirit of Myth, which is generic to all myths at all times. View quote
Mark Rothko
You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
What gets left out is the narrative between the bullets, which would tell us who's going to do what and how we're going to achieve the generic goals on the list. View quote
Edward R. Tufte
I'm just trying to avoid any sort of generic kind of music - I don't want to do generic jazz or fusion. View quote
Andy Summers
When any young director gets hired by a studio to do a $125 million film based on a preexisting piece of intellectual property, they're climbing into the meat grinder. And what you're coming out with on the other side is a generic, heavily studio-controlled pile of garbage that ends up on the side of Burger King wrappers. View quote
Neill Blomkamp
I demand of you, and of the whole world, that you show me a generic character-one that is according to generally accepted principles of classification, by which to distinguish between Man and Ape. I myself most assuredly know of none. ...But, if I had called man an ape, or vice versa, I should have fallen under the ban of all the ecclesiastics. It may be that as a naturalist I ought to have done so. View quote
Carl Linnaeus
Or indeed we may say again, it is in what I called Portrait-painting, delineating of men and things, especially of men, that Shakspeare is great. All the greatness of the man comes out decisively here. It is unexampled, I think, that calm creative perspicacity of Shakspeare. The thing he looks at reveals not this or that face of it, but its inmost heart and generic secret: it dissolves itself as in light before him, so that he discerns the perfect structure of it. Creative, we said: poetic creation, what is this too but seeing the thing sufficiently? The word that will describe the thing, follows of itself from such clear intense sight of the thing. And is not Shakspeare's morality, his valour, candour, tolerance, truthfulness; his whole victorious strength and greatness, which can triumph over such obstructions, visible there too? Great as the world! View quote
Thomas Carlyle
Taking it in its wider and generic application, I understand faith to be the supplement of sense; or, to change the phrase, all knowledge which comes not to us through our senses we gain by faith in others. View quote
Matthew Simpson
If there were a generic one-word expression for 'one whose fear of the uncertainties of success moves him to surrender at the very moment of victory', it would be 'Republican'. View quote
L. Neil Smith
Many feminists have been grieved or aggrieved by The Left Hand of Darkness because the androgynes in it are called ‘he' throughout. In the third person singular, the English generic pronoun is the same as the masculine pronoun. A fact worth reflecting upon. And it's a trap, with no way out, because the exclusion of the feminine (she) and the neuter (it) from the generic/masculine (he) makes the use of either of them more specific, more unjust, as it were, than the use of ‘he.' And I find made-up pronouns, ‘te' and ‘heshe' and so on, dreary and annoying. (Ursula K. Le Guin)
There are a lot of stuff on the record that I am thinking is generic but actually it is just as good as everybody else who is putting stuff out at the time. View quote
Bruce Dickinson
Already in the last few decades, economic powers have reached the point of imperiling the stability of the state through new forms of the circulation of capital that go by the generic name of multinational corporations. View quote
Jean-François Lyotard
I just want to creatively grow and be inspired. I don't want to do anything generic or dumb. View quote
Sienna Miller
I was in the supermarket the other day, and I met a lady in the aisle where they keep the generic brands. Her name was 'woman. View quote
Steven Wright
Moralistic is not moral. And as for truth - well, it's like brown - it's not in the spectrum. Truth is so generic. View quote
Iris Murdoch
People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that architecture has nothing to do with it. Of course, that's both liberating and alarming. But the generic city, the general urban condition, is happening everywhere, and just the fact that it occurs in such enormous quantities must mean that it's habitable. Architecture can't do anything that the culture doesn't. We all complain that we are confronted by urban environments that are completely similar. We say we want to create beauty, identity, quality, singularity. And yet, maybe in truth these cities that we have are desired. Maybe their very characterlessness provides the best context for living. View quote
Rem Koolhaas
I think there's something great and generic about goldfish. They're everybody's first pet. View quote
Paul Rudd
In the studio system, things are expected of a film. By the first, second, third act, there's a generic language that comes out of the more commercial system. View quote
Ralph Fiennes
When you have too many people and you're trying to satisfy everybody's input, you usually end up with something so incredibly generic that it has no point of view. View quote
Rob Zombie
The ongoing transformation of communication technology in the digital age extends the reach of communication media to all domains of social life in a network that is at the same time global and local, generic and customised in an ever-changing pattern. (Manuel Castells)
If one category had to be designated as an emblem of my thought, it would be neither Cantor's pure multiple, nor Godel's constructible, nor the void, by which being is named, nor even the event, in which the supplement of what-is-not-being-qua-being originates. It would be the generic. View quote
Alain Badiou
The cliches are that it's the most generic Starsky and Hutch plot you can find. View quote
Ben Stiller
The theory of the origin of new species by variation will also explain why a species which has once died out never reappears, and why the fossil fauna and flora recede farther and farther from the living type in proportion as we trace it back to remoter ages. It would also account for the fact, that when we have to intercalate a new set of fossiliferous strata between two groups previously known, the newly discovered fossils serve to fill up gaps between specific or generic types previously familiar to us, supplying often the missing links of the chain, which, if transmutation is accepted, must once have been continuous. View quote
Charles Lyell
Imagine, if you will, the dispiriting experience of listening to an awful cover of one of your favorite songs. That's how I felt sitting through Die Another Day, the 20th official outing for [James Bond]. This is a train wreck of an action film ... What's missing from this movie? Any real sense that we're watching 007 rather than a generic spy in a tuxedo. View quote
James Berardinelli