Define Your Terms Quotes

#1. NEVER allow the enemy to define your terms. If you want to win a war of propaganda, you must be able to manipulate language to expose the truth.

Jenifer Mohammed

#2. If you wish to converse with me, define your terms.

Voltaire

#3. As long as people tend to define themselves at least partially in terms of the work they do, any change to that work, its procedures and modes, is likely to have self-definitional importance to them. This can lead to surprising amounts of change resistance.

Tom DeMarco

#4. Conservatives define themselves in terms of what they oppose.

George Will

#5. I can't really define it in sexual terms alone although our sexuality is so energizing why not enjoy it too?

Audre Lorde

#6. Being happy requires that you define your life in your own terms and then throw your whole heart into living your life to the fullest. In a way, happiness requires that you be perfectly selfish in order to develop yourself to a point where you can be unselfish for the rest of your life.

Brian Tracy

#7. The key to accepting responsibility for your life is to accept the fact that your choices, every one of them, are leading you inexorably to either success or failure, however you define those terms.

Neal Boortz

#8. Whatever you do in terms of telling a story, the most important thing that you can define is who you are.

John Patrick Shanley

#9. It was time to take up the discussion over governance, housing, transportation, security, health care, and education - to define the country we wanted and outline our terms. Who were we. . . . What were our limits and our ambitions?

Juliana Barbassa

#10. My point is that we much decolonize our minds and re-name and re-define ourselves ... In all respects, culturally, politically, socially, we must re-define ourselves and our lives, in our own terms.

Max Roach

#11. It is just because civilization is ever evolving, changing, and becoming more complicated, that experts find it so difficult to define it in explicit terms.

Arthur Keith

#12. We need to punch back against the extremes of both the left and the right and define the terms of the debate ourselves.

John Avlon

#13. We must conclude that it is not only a particular political ideology that has failed, but the idea that men and women could ever define themselves in terms that exclude their spiritual needs.

Salman Rushdie

#14. Never define yourself in terms of how you are negatively affected by others.

Bill Crawford

#15. Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it.

Walter Pater

#16. I love sharing photographs and websites, I'm for all of these things. I'm for Facebook. But to say that this is sociability? We begin to define things in terms of what technology enables and technology allows.

Sherry Turkle

#17. For far too long economists have sought to define themselves in terms of their supposedly scientific methods. In fact, those methods rely on an immoderate use of mathematical models, which are frequently no more than an excuse for occupying the terrain and masking the vacuity of the content.

Thomas Piketty

#18. To each, or about each, of his colleagues he had said at one time or other, something ... something impossible to recall in this or that case and difficult to define in general terms
some careless bright and harsh trifle that had grazed a stretch of raw flesh.

Vladimir Nabokov

#19. Comparison, a great teacher once told me, is the cardinal sin of modern life. It traps us in a game that we can't win. Once we define ourselves in terms of others, we lose the freedom to shape our own lives.

James C. Collins

#20. Define success on your own terms, achieve it by your own rules, and build a life you're proud to live.

Anne Sweeney

#21. If you're going to define me properly, you must think in terms of my failures as well as my successes.

Harrison Ford

#22. Nick Cardy's work helped define some of the things we see in comics today and take for granted. He broke out of the mold in terms of covers and layout and created a truly interactive experience for the reader that directly points back to his time with the Eisner studio.

Jim Lee

#23. As we get older, we define happiness less in terms of excitement and more in terms of peacefulness. Reverend Veronica Goines sums this up as, "Peace is joy at rest, and joy is peace on its feet.

Sheryl Sandberg

#24. (1) Define a to-do list and (2) define a not-to-do list. In general terms, there are but two questions:

Timothy Ferriss

#25. To probe for unconscious determinants of behavior and then define a man in their terms exclusively, ignoring his overt behavior altogether, is a greater distortion than ignoring the unconscious completely.

Willard Gaylin

#26. Never be limited by others' inability to think of you in terms big enough or dreams grand enough. Never allow yourself to define what is possible for you in your life by others' limited vision of what they believe is possible for them in theirs.

Judy M. Ford

#27. Most controversies would soon be ended, if those engaged in them would first accurately define their terms, and then adhere to their definitions.

Tryon Edwards

#28. Always define WHAT you want to do with your life and WHAT you have to offer to the world, in terms of your favorite talents/gifts/skills-not in terms of a job-title.

Richard Nelson Bolles

#29. Define your goals in terms of the activities necessary to achieve them, and concentrate on those activities.

Brian Tracy

#30. What preoccupies us is the way we define success. If you see your life purely in terms of money and power, then everything in your life becomes about 'Am I getting ahead?' and that is truly a barbaric way to live, because it eliminates huge chunks of our humanity.

Arianna Huffington

#31. Define what your brand stands for, its core values and tone of voice, and then communicate consistently in those terms.

Simon Mainwaring

#32. Terms don't define our lives; our lives define our terms.

Joshua Harris

#33. Substance is a subspecies of value. When you reverse the containment process and define substance in terms of value the mystery disappears: substance is a "stable pattern of inorganic values." The problem then disappears. The world of objects and the world of values is unified.

Robert M. Pirsig

#34. I do not define my job in any rigid terms but in terms of having the flexibility to what seems to me to be in the best interests of the company at any times.

Henry Earl Singleton

#35. Despite their physical inability to engage with race on the very visual terms that are thought to define its salience and social significance, blind people's understanding and experience with race is not unlike that of sighted individuals.

Osagie Obasogie

#36. We can in fact only define a weed, mutatis mutandis, in terms of the well-known definition of dirt - as matter out of place. What we call a weed is in fact merely a plant growing where we do not want it.

Edward James Salisbury

#37. I think the world would be a lot better off if more people were to define themselves in terms of their own standards and values and not what other people said or thought about them.

Hillary Clinton

#38. The faculty know what they need to develop and they need to work with an administrator with the authority do get it done. To define everything in terms of these index numbers is ridiculous.

Henry Rosovsky

#39. Romantic love has its place but to define relationship solely in romantic terms is like describing marriage only by what a couple does on their honeymoon.

Dermot Davis

#40. Good and bad, I define these terms, quite clear, no doubt, somehow.

Bob Dylan

#41. I think transwomen, and transpeople in general, show everyone that you can define what it means to be a man or woman on your own terms. A lot of what feminism is about is moving outside of roles and moving outside of expectations of who and what you're supposed to be to live a more authentic life.

Laverne Cox

#42. My work is trying to at least define myself on my own terms, and then if other people enjoy things that's a lovely addition.

Bo Burnham

#43. Sisters define their rivalry in terms of competition for the gold cup of parental love. It is never perceived as a cup which runneth over, rather a finite vessel from which the more one sister drinks, the less is left over for the others.

Elizabeth Fishel

#44. How many a dispute could have been deflated into a single paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms

Aristotle.

#45. And personalities define themselves in terms of other personalities.

Terry Pratchett

#46. Self-esteem comes from being able to define the world in your own terms and refusing to abide by the judgments of others.

Oprah Winfrey

#47. In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Benjamin Franklin

#48. Humans feel at home in a world of things, whose essences and laws it can grasp and define in terms of concepts; but shy and ill at ease in a world of existences, because to exist is an act, not a thing.

Etienne Gilson

#49. As white women ignore their built-in privilege of whiteness and define woman in terms of their own experience alone, then women of Color become "other," the outsider whose experience and tradition is too "alien" to comprehend.

Audre Lorde

#50. A man should know about himself two or three things: whether he is a coward; whether he is an honest man or given to lies; whether he is an ambitious man. One should define oneself first of all in those terms, and only then in terms of culture, race, creed.

Joseph Brodsky

#51. Chinese define image in these terms: there are three mirrors that form a person's reflection; the first is how you see yourself, the second is how others see you and the third mirror reflects the truth.

Robin S. Sharma

#52. In philosophy class I think we finally decided that 'good' is an infinitely recursive term - it can't be defined except in terms of itself. Good is good because it's better than bad, though why it's better to be good than bad depends on how you define good, and on and on.

Orson Scott Card

#53. Words have the power to release pent-up emotions as well as to define them in rational and meaningful terms.

Jeff Cohen

#54. You get to define the terms of your life.

Cheryl Strayed

#55. You do understand that you can't force the situation, but in terms of how you edit, you can define that to take the audience along, whether it be a storyline or a character moment that we can play out. The more experience you've had, the more beneficial it is, period.

Barry Levinson

#56. Any attempt to define literary theory in terms of a distinctive method is doomed to failure.

Terry Eagleton