Arbitrary Quotations

But if it not be true, the myth itself requires to be explained, and every principle of philosophy and common sense demand that the explanation be sought, not in arbitrary allegorical categories, but in the actual facts of ritual or religious custom to which the myth attaches.

Good and bad are really arbitrary words when it comes to character.

I often feel a discomfort, a kind of embarrassment, when I explain elementary-particle physics to laypeople. It all seems so arbitrary - the ridiculous collection of fundamental particles, the lack of pattern to their masses.

Personally, I don't like the term 'success.' It's too arbitrary and too relative a thing. It's usually someone else's definition, not yours.

The possession of arbitrary power has always, the world over, tended irresistibly to destroy humane sensibility, magnanimity, and truth.

Movies tie things up in an arbitrary length of time, but I have always liked things that aren't fully realised.

The intelligent ruler makes the law select men and makes no arbitrary appointment himself; he makes the law measure merits and makes no arbitrary judgment himself.

Aside from that reservation, a fictive tale even has the advantage of manifesting symbolic necessity more purely to the extent that we may believe its conception arbitrary.

It is true, indeed, that the national domain is ours. It is true it was acquired by the valor and with the wealth of the whole nation. But we hold, nevertheless, no arbitrary power over it.

Laws fixed, certain, and uniform, are said to be the distinguishing traits of civilized from savage communities. In these last, seldom are any laws, unless it be the arbitrary and uncertain will of the strongest.

I wanted to make a movie about the arbitrary nature of love.

Because the Illinois death penalty system is arbitrary and capricious - and therefore immoral - I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death.

I make a distinction between manners and etiquette - manners as the principles, which are eternal and universal, etiquette as the particular rules which are arbitrary and different in different times, different situations, different cultures.

Gold and silver, like other commodities, have an intrinsic value, which is not arbitrary, but is dependent on their scarcity, the quantity of labour bestowed in procuring them, and the value of the capital employed in the mines which produce them.

Standards of beauty are arbitrary. Body shame exists only to the extent that our physiques don't match our own beliefs about how we should look.

Democracy is about non-arbitrary decisions. Democracy is about spreading decisions; it is not about destroying processes.

I wanted to dismantle the bollocks that there's a military structure to a gang, with a leader, second leader, the good looking one, first babe, second babe. It's far more arbitrary than that and their values shouldn't be romanticised. They aren't something you want to sign up to.

Designs of purely arbitrary nature cannot be expected to last long.

According to scholars of linguistics, the relation between a word and its meaning is arbitrary.

All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.

If vice and corruption prevail, liberty cannot subsist; but if virtue have the advantage, arbitrary power cannot be established.

Police in China can do whatever they want; after 81 days in arbitrary detention you clearly realise that they don't have to obey their own laws. In a society like this there is no negotiation, no discussion, except to tell you that power can crush you any time they want - not only you, your whole family and all people like you.

I read things like theology, and I read about science, 'Scientific American' and publications like that, because they stimulate again and again my sense of the almost arbitrary given-ness of experience, the fact that nothing can be taken for granted.

A lot of my movies were completely destroyed by the censors, who can be pretty arbitrary. They're not completely fair with how they treat one person vs. another.

If an educational act is to be efficacious, it will be only that one which tends to help toward the complete unfolding of life. To be thus helpful it is necessary rigorously to avoid the arrest of spontaneous movements and the imposition of arbitrary tasks.

I was a terrible student. Still, I managed to get into college, but my daydreaming threatened to sabotage me. I used behavior modification to break the cycle. I started by setting an arbitrary time limit on studying: for every 15 minutes of study, I'd allow myself an hour of daydreaming. I set the alarm.

They were saying computers deal with numbers. This was absolutely nonsense. Computers deal with arbitrary information of any kind.

I just think lots of words have physicality. How about the word 'wobble?' You think that's arbitrary? When you say the word 'wince,' you wince. How about that?

To me, length is an artificial and arbitrary factor in a film.

As a Jew, I was taught that it was ethically imperative to speak up and to speak out against arbitrary state violence. That was part of what I learned when I learned about the Second World War and the concentration camps.

I don't know who decided that skinny was more appealing than not skinny. It seems arbitrary.

For me writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz.

Science is not a game in which arbitrary rules are used to decide what explanations are to be permitted.

The big deal about the Internet design was you could have an arbitrary large number of networks so that they would all work together.

A slave government is an oligarchy; and one, too, of the most arbitrary and criminal character.

Be just and if you can't be just, be arbitrary.

People who don't like my work say that the connections seem too arbitrary. But that's how life is.

I got into acting as a young child on account of a sort of arbitrary thing. A friend of my mom's was a casting director, so really, as kind of a lark, I had a couple of acting jobs that had just enough exposure to give me the option to continue if I wanted to. I followed through with it.

You can build a statistical model and that's all well and good, but if you're dealing with a new type of financial instrument, for example, or a new type of situation - then the choices you're making are pretty arbitrary in a lot of respects.

The birth of science rang the death-knell of an arbitrary and constantly interposing Supreme Power.

The press doesn't just cover presidential campaigns, they influence them by making arbitrary decisions about who is 'top tier' and merits coverage.

On the face of it, it looks like it should be shorted -- not bought. It's the most arbitrary pricing I've ever seen.

Only the most outrageous, truly inadmissible limitations on the rights of international organizations were dropped. The bill still provides for widespread and arbitrary repression of Russian and international NGOs.

I would be inclined to support gas tax relief on the House floor, but I would prefer the reinstatement of the gas tax be based on price, not an arbitrary time frame,

Many of these activists are defending human rights. The authorities must ensure that they are able to continue with their peaceful activities without fear of arbitrary detention, harassment or other human rights violations.

We're given a deadline that's an arbitrary date to replace our machines when we didn't have any problems with our voting machines last time. They worked fine. And now, they are going to be absolutely useless.

Good design is thorough down to the last detail - Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the consumer.

Jackson went from the professor's chair to the officer's saddle. He carried with him the very elements of character which made him odious as a teacher; but I never saw him in an arbitrary mood.

Freedom under law is hard work. If rulers cannot be trusted with arbitrary power, it is up to citizens to raise their voices at injustice.

I don't think we should have some arbitrary timetable ... You give it as long as it takes to come to a conclusive and final judgment they're not cooperating. And at the present they're not.

I believe that what has happened in West Tisbury is going to have echoes for years to come around the ways we raise property taxes in Massachusetts. I think Bill Graham has shown us that there are huge flaws - frightening flaws - in the way towns conduct this type of business. There can be nothing arbitrary - and there should be nothing subjective - about the process of taxation. That's been a cornerstone of our government and our society.

Hard data is behind boundary changes. It is not an arbitrary decision at all.

Unless this is done, we shall be liable to be ruled by an arbitrary and capricious armed tyranny, whose word and will must be law.

Local government represents the cornerstone of the United States, and we fully support the critical role that localities play in protecting consumer and citizen rights. However, with 78 car rental excise taxes in 37 states, and 45 more such taxes pending or under discussion, we must speak out on behalf of our customers. These arbitrary taxes unfairly single out our customers and potentially interfere with interstate commerce by hindering free trade in the nationwide car rental industry.

Like other potentates with a long habit of arbitrary authority, she covered her perplexity with a smart show of decision.

Patriotism is a arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles.

It is deplorable, but not tragic, simply to be a victim of circumstance. Sheer victimization is not an assertion - and it naturally makes not for vision but for frustration. The victimizing circumstances, or accidents, seem arbitrary and exorbitant, even silly.

Over the past year there has arisen an apparent absence of fear of punishment in regards to the arbitrary divulging of classified information.

It is somewhat arbitrary because it's a moving average. How do you determine what you would have earned on that particular date?

Thus the creation, which seems an arbitrary act, supposes laws as invariable as those of the fatality of the Atheists. It would be absurd to say that the Creator might govern the world without those rules, since without them it could not subsist.

While we have entertained the contention that a deed may make more propaganda than hundreds of speeches, thousands of articles, and tens of thousands of pamphlets, we have held that an arbitrary act of violence will not necessarily have such an effect.

Inflation is the fiscal complement of statism and arbitrary government. It is a cog in the complex of policies and institutions which gradually lead toward totalitarianism .

There are those that are saying you have to be able to dial back to any arbitrary point in time. From our discussions with the mid-market, that's not exactly something they are looking for.

I no longer see Descartes' statement as arbitrary. It is representative of our culture's narcissism. This narcissism leads to a disturbing disrespect for direct experience and a negation of the body.

The most pernicious of all taxes are the arbitrary.

We're not going to be tied to an arbitrary date on the calendar. We haven't scheduled it yet. If it's needed we want to make sure it has maximum impact.

The decree of a coercive tribunal would not need to conform to the true standard of wages, the final productivity of social labor. It would introduce into distribution a genuinely arbitrary element, with a very large ultimate power to pervert the natural system.

Songwriting requires some sort of ceremony to even get the process started, and it can be somewhat arbitrary.

I sit at my desk each night with no place to go, opening the wrinkled maps of Milwaukee and Buffalo, the whole U.S., its cemeteries, its arbitrary time zones, through routes like small veins, capitals like small stones.

When will the arbitrary be granted the place it deserves in the formation of works and ideas?

No matter what any of the grammar teachers say, punctuation is an arbitrary matter. It should be used to make sentences clear.

National socialism is the determination to create a new man. There will no longer exist any individual arbitrary will, nor realms in which the individual belongs to himself. The time of happiness as a private matter is over.

[I]f vice and corruption prevail, liberty cannot subsist; but if virtue have the advantage, arbitrary power cannot be established.

Why an arbitrary figure of 30 days? The US Government has long accepted it only takes one day to be exposed to Agent Orange.

This report by the U.S. government provides a thorough review of today's human rights practices around the globe, except for one glaring omission -- its own record. The United States government considers itself a moral leader on human rights issues, but its record of indefinite and arbitrary detentions, secret 'black sites' and outsourced torture in the 'war on terror' turns it from leader to human rights violator.

No matter how many times your amazing, absolutely brilliant work is rejected by the client, for whatever dopey, arbitrary reason, there is often another amazing, absolutely brilliant solution possible. Sometimes it's even better.

In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs.

A person's willingness to conform to arbitrary parameters is not a good criterion for selecting talent or allocating rewards.

There is nothing to guarantee the superior judgment, knowledge, and integrity of an inspector or a bureaucrat-and the deadly consequences of entrusting him with arbitrary power are obvious.

The permanent mission of Cuba to the United Nations wishes to protest strongly at the arbitrary decision and to state that it disagrees completely with the pretexts given.

The point is that you could structure this arbitrary information in any way. Well, given that, now we can write text that can go in all directions.

Through an arbitrary problem, I had arrived at a tenet of good writing: brevity wins.

courts must be especially vigilant, must vigorously resist encroachments that heighten the potential for arbitrary government action.

We are calling on the Department of Energy to back down on the arbitrary race to deal with the waste. The decisions that are made will have consequences into the distant future.

The government shouldn't deny the fundamental rights of people to organize peaceful protest program by carrying out arbitrary detention of leaders like in the past.

These remotely controlled in vivo robots provide the surgeon with an enhanced field of view from arbitrary angles, as well as provide dexterous manipulators not constrained by small incisions in the abdominal wall.

These charges are nothing but an easy money-spinner for the banks. Charges should be fair and reflect the costs involved - not, as they are now, an arbitrary figure picked to make the most money out of unsuspecting customers.

The right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible.

Heydrich, Eichmann, and company therefore invoke the usual trick of argument for breaking a true continuum that lacks a compelling point for separation: choose an arbitrary dividing line and then treat it as a self-evident law of nature.

To many, the word coercion implies arbitrary decisions of distant and irresponsible bureaucrats; but this is not a necessary part of its meaning.

To be fully comfortable to the principle of right, the form of government must be representative. This is the only one that permits republicanism, without which the government is arbitrary and despotic, whatever the constitution may be.

Successful exploitation of the vulnerability on Cisco IOS may result in a reload of the device or execution of arbitrary code, ... Repeated exploitation could result in a sustained (denial of service) attack or execution of arbitrary code.

Successful exploitation of this overflow condition could possibly allow a malicious attacker to create a denial of service disrupting backup systems or potentially allow execution of arbitrary code with elevated privileges on a targeted system.

The government wants to block the independence of the judiciary. Judges are speaking out against arbitrary laws and repression of individuals, and so the authorities feel they must stop them.

That's going to be really arbitrary to police because even the most sublime bump drafts at a time when a guy's getting ready to make a move in another direction can result in sending a guy out of control.

'Reversible Errors' is about the limits of the law to define who committed ultimate evil, to define what ultimate evil is, to allow the million arbitrary factors to make this a meaningful punishment, and finally to say, 'Are we really accomplishing what we wanted to accomplish? Are those anxieties relieved?' I don't think so.

Sometimes deadlines help and sometimes they don't make much of a difference. They rarely hurt, unless they are arbitrary or excessively short. But if you are working in good faith and the deadlines can be extended if progress is being made, they work well.

Teacher tenure is a myth, ... California teachers only have basic due process rights so they aren't fired for arbitrary reasons like speaking out on behalf of textbooks for their students. Proposition 74 just adds millions in costs to the current evaluation system and does absolutely nothing to improve education or help students.

The president thinks the ICC is fundamentally flawed because it puts American servicemen and women at fundamental risk of being tried by an entity that is beyond America's reach, beyond America's laws and can subject American civilian and military to arbitrary standards of justice.

You're being told that the TV rating system is enough to protect children, that it's ultimately up to parents to do something about the problem caused by Hollywood. This to me is an amazing dodge. The ratings system has been an inconsistent, inaccurate, arbitrary and capricious mess.