Arbitrary Quotes

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

It is convention and arbitrary rewards which make all the merit and demerit of what we call vice and virtue.

Hard times are purposeful, meant to refine and redirect us. They're not arbitrary or random, and they're definitely not cruel.

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

Art is not arbitrary. A fine painting is not there by accident; it is not arrived at by chance. We are sensitive to tonalities.

Arbitrary power is but the first natural step from anarchy, or the savage life.

This, then, is freedom in the external life of man-that he is independent of the arbitrary power of his fellows.

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.

I am a mortal enemy to arbitrary government and unlimited power.

Rules are foolish, arbitrary, mindless things that raise you quickly to a level of acceptable mediocrity, then prevent you from progressing further.

What we don't need in country music is divisiveness, public criticism of each other, and some arbitrary judgement of what belongs and what doesn't.

Law and arbitrary power are at eternal enmity.

The desire for liberty has also made itself felt as struggle against domestic tyranny or arbitrary rule.

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

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

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.

Those objecting to the concept of race argue that the taxonomic definitions are arbitrary and subjective.

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

As we deepen in understanding, the arbitrary divisions between inner and outer disappear. The essence of life, the beauty and grandeur of life, is its wholeness.

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

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.

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

I don't believe that Freedom of Information laws, which have arbitrary time periods or broad blanket exemptions, meet the level of transparency that society needs today.

I didn't want to write a biographie romancee especially since I already write novels, nor did I want to challenge the rules of the biography game, arbitrary as those rules might be

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

There's an arbitrary idea that the horizontal edge in a frame has to be the point of reference.

If I don't know what's coming - that is, if I have no hard-and-fast image, as I have with a photographic original - then arbitrary choice and chance play an important part.

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

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.

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.

Arbitrary benchmarks cheat kids out of a fulfilling education.

Any Congressional agreement of an arbitrary time table to bring our troops home before we have accomplished our mission is unacceptable and could potentially increase the risk to our soldiers.

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.

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

One of the very basic ideas of Post-Modernism is rejection of arbitrary power structures. Different people are sensitive to different kinds of power structures.

What causes adolescents to rebel is not the assertion of authority but the arbitrary use of power, with little explanation of the rules and no involvement in the decision-making.

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.

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 .

'Arbitrary' and 'odd' are the words which best describe the pattern of my career. I'm perpetually baffled by the whole thing.

Grammar is not a set of arbitrary rules; it is a compact between people who wish to understand each other.

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?

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

Science fiction writers put characters into a world with arbitrary rules and work out what happens.

Fascism is [...] arbitrary rule by a charismatic head of state.

The practice of arbitrary imprisonments have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.

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

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

The score must govern the music. It must have authority, and not merely be an arbitrary jumping-off point for improvisation.

The most pernicious of all taxes are the arbitrary.

Learning should take place when it is needed, when the learner is interested, not according to some arbitrary, fixed schedule