Arbitrarily Quotes

#1. Even if you believe a creator god invented the laws of physics, would you so insult him as to suggest that he might capriciously and arbitrarily violate them in order to walk on water, or turn water into wine as a cheap party trick at a wedding?

Richard Dawkins

#2. My notion of spirituality was different than it is now, but even if I'd been the most fundamentalist of believers, I would have assumed that God had better things to do than arbitrarily smite me with shaking palsy.

Michael J. Fox

#3. I have a feeling that any simple problem can be made arbitrarily difficult by imposing a suitably heavy administrative process around the development.

Joe Armstrong

#4. We, as a society, have arbitrarily differentiated between acceptable and unacceptable drug addictions.

Steven Kassels

#5. Doubtless you begin to understand how disagreeable it is to me to do a thing arbitrarily, when it is unsatisfactory to others associated with me.

Abraham Lincoln

#6. As long as the government can arbitrarily decide which substances are legal and which are illegal, then those who remain behind bars for illegal substances are political prisoners

Paul Krassner

#7. I must react selectively, contrarily, arbitrarily, perversely, and always with intensity directly from the subject.

Keith Crown

#8. Warren criticized as deplorable and unnecessary the use of arbitrarily inflicted punishments and the customary repressions of the school system; "The natural rewards and punishments of their conduct . . . I consider the only species of government that does not produce more evil than good."32

James J. Martin

#9. Corporate globalization is being relentlessly and arbitrarily imposed on an essentially feudal society, tearing through its complex, tiered social fabric, ripping it apart culturally and economically.

Arundhati Roy

#10. Good government is that which delivers the citizen from being done out of his life and property too arbitrarily and violently-one that relieves him sufficiently from the barbaric business of guarding them to enable him to engage in gentler, more dignified, and more agreeable undertakings ...

H.L. Mencken

#11. When consumers do not take full advantage of efficiency gains, it is because they are weighing other factors that influence their decision making. When the federal government arbitrarily places one of those factors over others, it makes consumers worse off.

Gina McCarthy

#12. It is important to reclaim for humanity the ground that has been taken from it by various arbitrarily narrow formulations of the demands of rationality

Amartya Sen

#13. He pretended they were someone else's parents or recently released patients from a mental hospital who had arbitrarily chosen to root for him. Mainly, he figured they were a little goofy, but that was okay.

Paul Levine

#14. Humanism means that the man is the measure of all things ... But it is not only that man must start from himself in the area of knowledge and learning, but any value system must come arbitrarily from man himself by arbitrary choice.

Francis A. Schaeffer

#15. Our public schools arbitrarily define science as explaining the world by natural processes alone. In essence, a religion of naturalism is being imposed on millions of students. They need to be taught the real nature of science, including its limitations.

Ken Ham

#16. Dichotomies are most mischevious when they arbitrarily separate parts of a highly interrelated and complex system.

David W. Ehrenfeld

#17. [It is a] well-known fact that the likely contacts of two individuals who are closely acquainted tend to be more overlapping than those of two arbitrarily selected individuals

Anatol Rapoport

#18. Her sureness was based on the power to limit experience arbitrarily.

Nathanael West

#19. Perhaps, in the extravagance of youth, we give away our devotions easily and all but arbitrarily, on the mistaken assumption that we'll always have more to give.

Michael Cunningham

#20. No experiment can distinguish between phenomena manifested by visiting interstellar (arbitrarily advanced) ETI and intelligent beings that may exist near Earth within a parallel universe or in different dimensions, or who are (terrestrial) time travelers.

Cris Putnam

#21. Women ought to have representatives, instead of being arbitrarily governed without any direct share allowed them in the deliberations of government.

Mary Wollstonecraft

#22. The rate of inflation can't be judged accurately by a few items the government arbitrarily chooses to measure.

James Cook

#23. A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

Graham Greene

#24. If facts, logic, and scientific procedures are all just arbitrarily "socially constructed" notions, then all that is left is consensus
more specifically peer consensus, the kind of consensus that matters to adolescents or to many among the intelligentsia.

Thomas Sowell

#25. The forces of nature aren't arbitrarily selected in some way by
chance or design, they are simply the possible directions of time.

Gevin Giorbran

#26. If boredom is, as Heidegger argued, the awareness of time passing, then surgery felt like the opposite: the intense focus made the arms of the clock seem arbitrarily placed. Two hours could feel like a minute.

Paul Kalanithi

#27. When you stubbornly give one man a chance, you arbitrarily deny it to another one.

Simone De Beauvoir

#28. Knowledge is power. Most of us agree that something has to be done to strengthen Social Security, and I believe it's irresponsible to arbitrarily dismiss any idea, Republican nor Democrat, without giving it a hard look.

Conrad Burns

#29. Art must take reality by surprise. It takes those moments which are for us merely a moment, plus a moment, plus another moment, and arbitrarily transforms them into a special series of moments held together by a major emotion.

Francoise Sagan

#30. But the cruelest habit the modern prophecy-savans have, is that one of coolly and arbitrarily fitting the prophetic shirt on to the wrong man. They do it without regard to rhyme or reason.

Mark Twain

#31. Of course the word chaos is used in rather a vague sense by a lot of writers, but in physics it means a particular phenomenon, namely that in a nonlinear system the outcome is often indefinitely, arbitrarily sensitive to tiny changes in the initial condition.

Murray Gell-Mann

#32. We're two sides of an infinitesimally thin coin. Slice the coin thinner and thinner, and we get closer and closer to each other. We can slice it arbitrarily thin, let the limit of the thickness approach zero. Slice it until there's no one or nothing in between, until we meet at zero.

Charles Yu

#33. Some memorizers arbitrarily associate each playing card with a familiar person or object, so that the king of clubs is represented by, say, Tony Danza. The grand masters associate each card with a person, an action, or an object so that every group of three cards can be converted into a sentence.

Joshua Foer

#34. Virtue and vice are concepts invented by human beings, words for a morality which human beings arbitrarily devised.

Osamu Dazai

#35. I believe ghosts are like dogs and they just sort of do things arbitrarily.

Charles Barkley

#36. Hence it is a mistake to think, that the supreme or legislative power of any common-wealth, can do what it will, and dispose of the estates of the subject arbitrarily, or take any part of them at pleasure.

John Locke

#37. History is not a book, arbitrarily divided into chapters, or a drama chopped into separate acts; it has flowed forward. Rome is a continuity, called 'eternal.' What has accumulated in this place acts on everyone, day and night, like an extra climate.

Elizabeth Bowen

#38. Time meant opportunity. After all, what more do we have than time? We measure it arbitrarily, but as we spend it, until it's used up, it is called living.

Kenneth Eade

#39. One solution might be to impose the duty on admissions officers to arbitrarily admit only half women and half men.

Phyllis Schlafly

#40. For me happiness occurs arbitrarily: a moment of eye contact on a bus, where all at once you fall in love; or a frozen second in a park where it's enough that there are trees in the world.

Russell Brand

#41. I'm just not arbitrarily choosing to have five guitars play one type of thing. In that way there's a definite similarity between a symphony orchestra and the 100 guitar symphony.

Glenn Branca

#42. Gold was not selected arbitrarily by governments to be the monetary standard. Gold had developed for many centuries on the free market as the best money; as the commodity providing the most stable and desirable monetary medium.

Murray Rothbard

#43. Life is full of disparate details arbitrarily joined together by dreams, pain and yearning. I do not long for sense, but I call for emotion and imagination amidst this chaos.

Juhani Peltonen

#44. A genuinely free and educated man should be able to tune himself, as one tunes a musical instrument, absolutely arbitrarily, at his convenience at any time and to any degree, philosophically or philologically, critically or poetically, historically or rhetorically, in ancient or modern form.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

#45. As long as artists arbitrarily assume the right to decide what is or is not art, it is logical that the public will just as arbitrarily feel that they have the right to reject it.

Leon Krier

#46. Why do we electrocute men for murdering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass slaughter of someone arbitrarily labeled enemy?

Sylvia Plath

#47. If there are no things which are important, then things are assigned importance arbitrarily and defended at great risk. Because the risk validates the importance.

Robert B. Parker

#48. It can hardly be denied that such a demand quite arbitrarily limits the facts which are to be admitted as possible causes of the events which occur in the real world.

Friedrich August Von Hayek

#49. (on A History of Western Philosophy) I was sometimes accused by reviewers of writing not a true history but a biased account of the events that I arbitrarily chose to write of. But to my mind, a man without a bias cannot write interesting history - if, indeed, such man exists.

Bertrand Russell

#50. Douglas Blackmon, in Slavery by Another Name, describes how tens of thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily arrested during this period, many of them hit with court costs and fines, which had to be worked off in order to secure their release.

Michelle Alexander

#51. Laws of motion of any kind only become comprehensible to man when he can examine arbitrarily selected units of that motion. But at the same time it is this arbitrary division of continuous motion into discontinuous units which give rise to a large proportion of human error.

Leo Tolstoy

#52. A leader should not be a man who arbitrarily imported his own ideas but the essential focal point for a group of people who trusted one another and worked for a common aim.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#53. The true law of economics is chance, and we learned people arbitrarily seize on a few moments and establish them as laws.

Karl Marx

#54. Rohan, if being a hero is having the courage to resist using power arbitrarily, then you are a hero, beloved.

Melanie Rawn

#55. Good poetry could not have been otherwise written than it is. The first time you hear it, it sounds rather as if copied out of some invisible tablet in the Eternal mind than as if arbitrarily composed by the poet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#56. The balance between faith and reason is for the determination of each individual, and of the people as a whole, not of unauthorized government officials uttering impious humbug as they arbitrarily try to define that balance.

Conrad Black