Arbitrary Quotations | Page 2

The ballot is only useful as a screen from arbitrary power.

Once our algorithm has ten minutes' worth of typed English, it can recover arbitrary text, such as passwords.

The notion that anything can be invented wholly and that these invented things are classified as 'fiction' and that other writing, presumably not made up, is called 'nonfiction' strikes me as a very arbitrary separation of things.

As a coach, there are a lot of things, personally, I may or may not like or would not personally do - not necessarily may be my style, ... But you have to be very careful about inhibiting the passion for this game in an arbitrary way. I've got a very diverse group of players economically, socially, racially, geographically, with a number of different upbringings.

It's interesting to me, this sense of legacy and how far we can get from our roots. I find it really interesting what gets passed down, and how arbitrary that can be.

In terms of the wind speed, it's not really significant. It's only significant because we have these arbitrary boundaries between categories.

There can be no greater stretch of arbitrary power than is required to seize children from their parents, teach them whatever the authorities decree they shall be taught, and expropriate from the parents the funds to pay for the procedure.

Einstein argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.

Arbitrary caps on Medicare will mean that providers or beneficiaries will have to make up the difference through lower payment rates or higher cost sharing.

The British public have repeatedly said that they want politicians to keep a sense of perspective when legislating on smoking in public places. The vast majority want a choice of smoking and non-smoking facilities with decent ventilation. Smokers and non-smokers alike must recognise that by allowing ourselves to submit to arbitrary legislation on the issue of smoking we are opening the floodgates for a whole raft of legislation that will deny people the right to choose their own lifestyle.

The great triumph of the Sixties was to dramatize just how arbitrary and constructed the seeming normality of the Fifties had been. We rose up from our maple-wood twin beds and fell onto the great squishy, heated water bed of the Sixties.

The custom and fashion of today will be the awkwardness and outrage of tomorrow - so arbitrary are these transient laws

An attacker may leverage these issues to carry out a denial-of-service attack or execute arbitrary code on an affected computer with the privileges of the user viewing a malicious image. An attacker may gain system privileges if an administrator views the malicious file. Local code execution may also facilitate a complete compromise.

You must put the essence of what you want to say into a painting. The rest is arbitrary. Chosen with discernment, but chosen, and choice involves elimination.

The Chinese government, in handling such complicated international disputes, opposes the arbitrary use of sanctions or the threat of use of sanctions in the efforts to solve the question. It will only complicate the issue.

You can only judge him by his accomplishments, not the arbitrary yardsticks thrown around here in the run-up to the presidential campaign.

She didn’t understand a damned thing about life except that it was arbitrary and cruel, and some people got away with murder while others made one tiny, careless mistake and paid a terrible price.

He is annoyed with their lack of interest, their blithe ignorance of the arbitrary genetic lottery that has granted them their privileged lives.

It is clear that there is no classification of the Universe that is not arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what kind of thing the universe is.

Arbitrary government power is being multiplied daily by the now practically unchallenged assumption that wherever there is any problem of any kind to be solved, government is the agency to step in and solve it.

Arbitrary power has seldom... been introduced in any country at once. It must be introduced by slow degrees, and as it were step by step.

..where effective competition can be created, it is a better way of guiding individual efforts than any other... regards competition as superior not only because it is in most circumstances the most efficient method known but even more because it is the only method by which our activities can be adjusted to each other without coercive or arbitrary intervention of authority.

It is not the source but the limitation of power which prevents it from being arbitrary.

There's always something arbitrary when you limit a list to a fixed number. There easily could be 100 for another book.

You can't just make arbitrary caps without regard to jobs, without regard to costs.

We don't think that arbitrary caps work well. The costs of the local tax burdens have risen because the largest part of the school budgets are paid by local taxes. The problem is not at the local level.

Those trips add a lot to the cost of doing business. It's unnecessary. It's a fairly arbitrary law -- or was, past tense, was. That law changes the situation and the scenario considerably.

Through prayer, we look for ways to understand the arbitrary harm left by this storm and the mystery of undeserved suffering, ... And in our search, we are reminded that God's purposes are sometimes impossible to know here on earth. Yet ever as we are humbled by forces we cannot explain, we take comfort in the knowledge that no one is ever stranded beyond God's care.

What it will do is it will search through the C through Z drives and select randomly a set of files of varying extensions, and then it will zero out or kill the contents of an arbitrary extension of those files,

What it will do is search through the C: through Z: drives and select randomly a set of files of varying extensions, and then it will zero out or kill the contents of an arbitrary extension of those files,

There's a point I set for myself, and it's an arbitrary point, when I think no matter happens, I'm going to finish that book. And that's when I get to page 100. I have to see it out.

The connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary.

Love is a word. A sound. Its association with a particular feeling is arbitrary, unmeasurable, and ultimately meaningless

I look back, now, and I know that the naming moment, which seemed so insignificant then, which seemed to demand no more than an arbitrary and superstitious yes or no, was in fact a pivotal moment in my life.

I love that Voltaire was so willing to shock his readers with arbitrary cruelty. And I can completely relate to it.

Languages exist by arbitrary institutions and conventions among peoples; words, as the dialecticians tell us, do not signify naturally, but at our pleasure.

Poetry is a very complex art.... It is an art of pure sound bound in through an art of arbitrary and conventional symbols.

Everything has a reason, including the selection of the photos, which was not arbitrary but appropriate to the period, its highs and lows and my sense of them.

The first colour charts were unsystematic. They were based directly on commercial colour samples. They were still related to Pop Art. In the canvases that followed, the colours were chosen arbitrarily and drawn by chance. Then, 180 tones were mixed according to a given system and drawn by chance to make four variations of 180 tones. But after that the number 180 seemed too arbitrary to me, so I developed a system based on a number of rigorously defined tones and proportions.

Don't make a big distinction between fiction and non-fiction. These are arbitrary distinctions...

The grand principles of virtue and honor, however they may be distorted by arbitrary codes, are the same the world over: and wherethese principles are concerned, the right or wrong of any action appears the same to the uncultivated as to the enlightened mind.

Neither dead nor alive, the hostage is suspended by an incalculable outcome. It is not his destiny that awaits for him, nor his own death, but anonymous chance, which can only seem to him something absolutely arbitrary. He is in a state of radical emergency, of virtual extermination.

The truth is an arbitrary, shifting, culturally relative, and historically molded phenomenon.

The director's in charge of every single decision [in film]. It's a dictatorship.It's a benevolent dictatorship, but it's true. It's every single shot. There's nothing arbitrary.

Why are there beings at all instead of nothing? That is the question. Presumably it is not arbitrary question, "Why are there beings at all instead of nothing"- this is obviously the first of all questions. Of course it is not the first question in the chronological sense [...] And yet, we are each touched once, maybe even every now and then, by the concealed power of this question, without properly grasping what is happening to us. In great despair, for example, when all weight tends to dwindle away from things and the sense of things grows dark, the question looms.

And Nature takes no account of moral consequences, of arbitrary conditions which we create, and which we feel obliged to maintain at any cost.

Everything in life is arbitrary yet must be over-determined in literature. Jean McGarry knows how to tell a persuasive tale illuminating these truths.

Arbitrary benchmarks cheat kids out of a fulfilling education.

To choose one type of music at the exclusion of another would feel kind of sad and arbitrary.

A fundamental element of human nature is the need for creative work, for creative inquiry, for free creation without the arbitrary limiting effects of coercive institutions. A decent society should maximize the possibilities for this fundamental human characteristic to be realized.

• This seems impossible to me. It seems biologically impossible to stay the same size, although I must. It seems one must always be either bigger or smaller than they were at some arbitrary point in time to which all things are compared. The panties that are possibly tighter than they were. When? You can't say when. But you are absolutely positive no question that it's true.

Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere; I would be different.

I would like, in my arbitrary way, to bring one nearer to the actual human being.

There were two main points I wanted to get across in Valentine, the first being that yes, Valentine's Day is an arbitrary day, but why would you not take that excuse to celebrate love? The second point. . .since it is just an arbitrary day. . .why not treat every day like Valentine's Day?

To will a new form is unacceptable, because will builds distortion. Desire, too, is incomplete and arbitrary. These strategies, however intimate they might become, must especially be removed to clear the way for something else...

Charities are really good. To a certain extent, the ones you pick are arbitrary.

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.

The law is an artificial human construct, quite arbitrary, and of absolutely no use anywhere else but in a court of law!

I've decided I don't want to be a manager. Every time you try to be responsive to your employees, they say you're being reactive and not proactive. And when you try to be proactive, they accuse you of being capricious and arbitrary. So I don't wanna be a manager...

Current government regulation interferes with honest voluntary exchanges by imposing arbitrary terms and requiring tons of paperwork disclosing information no one wants anyway.

Virtue and vice are not arbitrary things; but there is a natural and eternal reason for goodness and virtue, and against vice and wickedness.

Art is subject to arbitrary fashion.

Loyalty and obedience to wisdom and justice are fine; but it is still finer to defy arbitrary power, unjustly and cruelly used--not on behalf of ourselves, but on behalf of others more helpless.

People don't mind positive stereotypes. People don't mind positive assumptions. It's only negative assumptions about them. So their outrage is so arbitrary.

The job of the press is to speak truth to power. And yet, for doing our job, we are persecuted. I say that these aggressive and illegal tactics to silence us - inventing arbitrary legal interpretations, over-zealous charges and disproportionate sentences - must not be permitted to succeed.

We can, if we so choose, wander aimlessly over the continent of the arbitrary. Rootless as some winged seed blown about on a serendipitous spring breeze.

The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.

The reason it's worth standing up for punctuation is not that it's an arbitrary system of notation known only to an over-sensitive elite who have attacks of the vapours when they see it misapplied. The reason to stand up for punctuation is that without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning.

Habit is altogether too arbitrary a master for me to submit to.

Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences.

All the proliferating falsifications of what I and everyone I know experienced once in what it is now so convenient to call the "fifties" or "sixties," as if life was really measured or lived in arbitrary decades, when the history books are sold like comix.

There's a rule for what makes good fantasy work, and it's as strange as any riddle ever posed in a fairy tale: In fantasy, you can do anything; and therefore, the one thing you must not do is 'just anything.' Why? Because in a story where anything can happen and anything can be true, nothing matters. You have no reason to care what happens. It's all arbitrary, and arbitrary isn't interesting.

Indeed, there is nothing more arbitrary than intervening as a stranger in a destiny which is not ours...

True love should be, according to its origin, entirely arbitrary and entirely accidental at the same time; it should seem both necessary and free; in keeping with its nature, however, it should be both destiny and virtue and appear as a mystery and a miracle.

Space in typography is like time in music. It is infinitely divisible, but a few proportional intervals can be much more useful than a limitless choice of arbitrary quantities.

Arbitrary rules teach kids discipline: If every rule made sense, they wouldn't be learning respect for authority, they'd be learning logic.

There is something so arbitrary about prizes.

I removed the freeway from its temporal context. Overpasses, cloverleafs, exit ramps took on the personality of Mayan ruins for me. Without destination, without cessation, my run was often silent and empty; there were no increments, no arbitrary graduations reducing time to functional units. I abstracted and purified.

We should try to achieve things for ourselves and not rely on former or past family glories with which we have no connection but the arbitrary nature of our birth.

In every society, the definitions of sanity and madness are arbitrary - are, in the largest sense, political.

When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of output and income, as it did in the nineteenth century and seems quite likely to do again in the twenty-first, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based.

The redemptive power of divine grace no longer seemed credible, nor very respectable in the arbitrary performance that was claimed for it.

I think many of the boundaries that convention has placed upon us are arbitrary, so we can fiddle with them if we fancy. Gravity's hard to dispute, and breathing, but a lot of things we instinctively obey are a lot of old tosh.

Every phenomenon can be experienced in two ways. These two ways are not arbitrary, but are bound up with the phenomenon – developing out of its nature and characteristics : Externally – or – inwardly.

Every seemingly arbitrary destructive action is a reaction of the organism to the frustration of a gratification of a vital need, especially of a sexual need.

The recommended daily allowances are based on arbitrary, unscientific, and tainted standards.

A doctor is not criticized for describing the manifestations and symptoms of an illness, even though the symptoms may be disgusting. I feel that a writer has the right to the same freedom In fact, I think that the time has come for the line between literature and science, a purely arbitrary line, to be erased.

The Constitution was framed fundamentally as a bulwark against governmental power, and preventing the arbitrary administration of punishment is a basic ideal of any society that purports to be governed by the rule of law.

Youth was so mercilessly hard in its decisions; it had its own unyielding standards and had not yet learned enough to know that time would prove them arbitrary.

The ideas of a time are like the clothes of a season: they are as arbitrary, as much imposed by some superior will which is seldom explicit.

All colours are arbitrary.

You hear a lot about God these days: God, the beneficent; God, the all-great; God, the Almighty; God, the most powerful; God, the giver of life; God, the creator of death. I mean, we're hearing about God all the time, so we better learn how to deal with it. But if we know anything about God, God is arbitrary.

Considered logically this concept is not identical with the totality of sense impressions referred to; but it is an arbitrary creation of the human (or animal) mind.

The fundamental article of my political creed is that despotism, or limited sovereignty, or absolute power is the same [whether] in a majority of a popular assembly; an aristocratic council; or oligarchical junto and a single emperor - equally arbitrary, cruel, bloody and in every respect diabolical.

I don't see any use in having a uniform and arbitrary way of spelling words. We might as well make all clothes alike and cook all dishes alike. Sameness is tiresome; variety is pleasing.

Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man.

The crisis is arrived when we must assert our rights, or submit to every imposition, that can be heaped upon us, till custom and use shall make us as tame and abject slaves, as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway.

Goverment is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are the most tolerable are arbitary, cruel, grasping, and unintelligent.

If a single act of folly was more responsible for this explosion than any other it was the arbitrary and dangerous announced decision that the Straits of Tiran would be closed. The right of innocent, maritime passage must be preserved for all nations

Pity on the person who has become accustomed to seeing in necessity something arbitrary, who ascribes to the arbitrary some sort of reason, and even claims that following that sort of reason has religious value.