“By a small sample we may judge of the whole piece.”
Source: Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605–1615), Part I, Book I, Ch. 4.
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Miguel de Cervantes 178
Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright 1547–1616Related quotes

Symmetry (1952) (quote on p. 138; referring to a letter by Évariste Galois to Auguste Chevalier from May 29, 1832, two days before Galois’ death, containing a testamentary summary of Galois’ discoveries)
Source: Transforming qualitative information (1998), p. 129.
“I am not in the least forbidden. You may sample me all you choose.”
Source: Wicked Pleasure

In a letter to Burke Aaron Hinsdale (1 January 1867); quoted in The Life of Gen. James A. Garfield (1880) by Jonas Mills Bundy, p. 77
1860s

My Philosophy, p. 125 https://books.google.com/books?id=pC28TnExGEEC&pg=PA115
My Philosophy (1933)

"Fads and Public Opinion"
What I Saw in America (1922)
Context: The truth is that prohibitions might have done far less harm as prohibitions, if a vague association had not arisen, on some dark day of human unreason, between prohibition and progress. And it was the progress that did the harm, not the prohibition. Men can enjoy life under considerable limitations, if they can be sure of their limited enjoyments; but under Progressive Puritanism we can never be sure of anything. The curse of it is not limitation; it is unlimited limitation. The evil is not in the restriction; but in the fact that nothing can ever restrict the restriction. The prohibitions are bound to progress point by point; more and more human rights and pleasures must of necessity be taken away; for it is of the nature of this futurism that the latest fad is the faith of the future, and the most fantastic fad inevitably makes the pace. Thus the worst thing in the seventeenth-century aberration was not so much Puritanism as sectarianism. It searched for truth not by synthesis but by subdivision. It not only broke religion into small pieces, but it was bound to choose the smallest piece.

“Although only a few may originate a policy, we are all able to judge it.”
As quoted in The Open Society and Its Enemies by Karl Popper (1966). Book II, chapter 40.