Top 100 Quotes About Arbitrary
#1. 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.
Bob Gill
#2. Custine described them as 'automata inconvenienced with a soul': a description true, perhaps, of all bureaucrats fearful for their jobs but truest of all where power is both arbitrary and completely centralised, as it was in Russia.
Theodore Dalrymple
#3. Could it be that we made arbitrary decisions at some point in the past (like the goslings that adopted Lorenz as their parent) and have built our lives on them ever since, assuming that the original decisions were wise?
Dan Ariely
#4. Arbitrary power is like most other things which are very hard, very liable to be broken.
Abigail Adams
#5. Languages exist by arbitrary institutions and conventions among peoples; words, as the dialecticians tell us, do not signify naturally, but at our pleasure.
Francois Rabelais
#7. Love is a word. A sound. Its association with a particular feeling is arbitrary, unmeasurable, and ultimately meaningless
Hugh Laurie
#8. Fate was faceless, life arbitrary, a tale told by an idiot.
Emma Donoghue
#9. Her concentration was gone, and last night she had had a nightmare about discovering a formalism that let her translate arbitrary concepts into mathematical expressions: then she had proven that life and death were equivalent.
Ted Chiang
#10. 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.
Maria Montessori
#11. 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
#12. Love is such an arbitrary thing. I love my mom. I love pancakes.
Doug Stanhope
#13. But there is something appealing about it here too, a freedom, a refusal to belong to theses arbitrary categories we've made for ourselves.
Veronica Roth
#14. 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.
Henry Hazlitt
#15. The novel form is about the protagonist's struggle to transform his arbitrary, fragmented, given experience into a narrative as meaningful as his favorite books.
Elif Batuman
#16. 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.
Gerhard Richter
#17. It is true, that a Law of Contract based on causae will always be an arbitrary and inelastic law; but it is a kind of law with which some great nations are satisfied at the present day.
Edward Jenks
#18. For years, my life has been flat. I'm not sure how else to describe it. I've never admitted it before. I'm not depressed, I don't think. That's not what I'm saying. Just flat, listless. So much has felt accidental, unnecessary, arbitrary. It's been lacking a dimension. Something seems to be missing.
Iain Reid
#19. A jurisdiction thus vague and arbitrary was exposed to the most dangerous abuse: the substance, as well as the form, of justice were often sacrificed to the prejudices of virtue, the bias of laudable affection, and the grosser seductions of interest or resentment.
Edward Gibbon
#20. Trials are not arbitrary. When I speak about them, I am referring to the mindful suffering.Man has come to his present development thanks to his hardships and trials.These are what prepare man for the Coming of Love.
Peter Deunov
#21. In the chain of events, it is arbitrary to be sentimental about the passing of any one link.
Johnny Rich
#22. No wonder so many adults long to return to university, to all those deadlines
ahhh, that structure! Scaffolding to which we may cling! Even if it is arbitrary, without it, we're lost, wholly incapable of separating the Romantic from the Victorian in our sad, bewildering lives ...
Marisha Pessl
#23. Maybe what I liked most about dancing is the rules. In a world where anything goes, here are solid arbitrary rules.
Chuck Palahniuk
#24. I was thinking about how fleeting and precious life is. Life is also arbitrary. For example, the choices that you make, the luck of being born into the right bed, to parents who support and help you and who love you. That doesn't always happen - and then, what happens when it doesn't?
Mary Ellen Mark
#25. Life is random and fucked-up and arbitrary, until you find someone who can make sense of it all for you - if only temporarily.
Matthew Quick
#26. The seams, the laminae between the various worlds the past present and future as well as the living and the nonliving may not be as distinct and clear-cut as we have been taught or as our somewhat arbitrary clocks and calendars have led us to believe.
Rick Bass
#27. If vice and corruption prevail, liberty cannot subsist; but if virtue have the advantage, arbitrary power cannot be established.
Algernon Sidney
#29. 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.
Liane Moriarty
#30. I believe that all of us have gangster proclivities and greedy orientations that need accountability. That's why democracies are necessary. We have to have institutions to try to curtail the use of arbitrary power so that our greedy orientations and gangster-like proclivities don't get out of hand.
Cornel West
#31. Contrary to what certain governments say, human rights are universal. Arbitrary detention, torture and discrimination hurt the human dignity of anybody, whatever his or her country of origin, religion, descent, or any other ground.
Shirin Ebadi
#32. 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.
Jacques Lacan
#33. No wonder most fleshers had stampeded into the polises, once they had the chance: if disease and aging weren't reason enough, there was gravity, friction, and inertia. The physical world was one vast, tangled obstacle course of pointless, arbitrary restrictions.
Greg Egan
#34. When man deploys the arbitrary nature of his madness, he confronts the dark necessity of the world; the animal that haunts his nightmares and his nights of privation is his own nature, which will lay bare hell's pitiless truth.
Michel Foucault
#35. The freedom of individuals from compulsion or coercion never was, and is not now, the normal state of human affairs. The normal state for the ordinary person is tyranny, arbitrary control and abuse mainly by their own government.
Walter E. Williams
#36. 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?
Roy Blount Jr.
#37. Pounce if I'm outta some arbitrary line, Specter, but from what you say this demilout's runnin' hogwild over creation with no better motive than a gratuitous and luxurious will to do evil.
Steve Aylett
#38. 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.
Amy Heckerling
#39. It's just strange to think that so much of our enjoyment from sports comes from the elevation of arbitrary differences.
Malcolm Gladwell
#40. The truest and greatest Poetry, (while subtly and necessarily always rhythmic, and distinguishable easily enough) can never again, in the English language, be express'd in arbitrary and rhyming metre, any more than the greatest eloquence, or the truest power and passion.
Walt Whitman
#41. Valuation is vague and arbitrary, when there is no assurance that it will be generally acquiesced in by others.
Jean-Baptiste Say
#42. Songwriting requires some sort of ceremony to even get the process started, and it can be somewhat arbitrary.
Andrew Bird
#44. Rules must be established and enforced, and, as numbers are increased in prisons, the necessity for vigilance increases. These rules, let it be understood, may be kindly while firmly enforced. I would never suffer any exhibition of ill-temper or an arbitrary exercise of authority.
Dorothea Dix
#45. The most insupportable of tyrants exclaim against the exercise of arbitrary power.
Roger L'Estrange
#46. 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.
Derrick Jensen
#47. 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.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#48. I never allow myself to be influenced in the smallest degree either by atmospheric disturbances or by the arbitrary divisions of what is known as Time.
Marcel Proust
#49. Keynes declared capitalism the best system ever devised to achieve a civilized economic society. But he recognized in it two major faults - its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.
Robert B. Reich
#50. Under budgetary pressure (arbitrary or not) it is truly remarkable how many options one discovers one can do without.
James R. Schlesinger
#51. I don't just write a script, and then someone takes it away and builds a game. I am continually getting input in order to create a big suspension field to hold the gameplay together so that the gamers aren't doing arbitrary tasks, so that they are doing things that seem meaningful.
Marc Laidlaw
#52. If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse gift will find a fitting place.
Margaret Mead
#53. Fiction inhabits the zone between the real and the impossible. The tug of those two poles is what gives it motion, vitality. Tethering fiction too tightly to the real produces plodding, lifeless stories. Letting it float too far from that anchor produces stories that are arbitrary and unpersuasive.
Vinnie Tesla
#54. But birthdays are random ... Defining one's life by the day one was cut from an umbilical cord is completely arbitrary.
Neal Shusterman
#55. A slave government is an oligarchy; and one, too, of the most arbitrary and criminal character.
Lysander Spooner
#56. Arbitrary benchmarks cheat kids out of a fulfilling education.
James Dyson
#57. I stand corrected. Yours is a far superior arbitrary system of governance.
A. Lee Martinez
#58. A theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements. It must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations.
Stephen Hawking
#59. When will the arbitrary be granted the place it deserves in the formation of works and ideas?
Andre Breton
#60. Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles.
George Jean Nathan
#61. This, then, is freedom in the external life of man-that he is independent of the arbitrary power of his fellows.
Ludwig Von Mises
#62. I understood how strangers met and fell into bed, not how they met and fell in love. I wasn't sure what falling in love meant. The very notion seemed so corny, so arbitrary, so fragile.
Chloe Thurlow
#63. You know those award shows. The cliche is that it's an honor just to be nominated, but that happens to be true. Whoever wins it in the end, I don't know, sometimes it feels arbitrary. Sometimes it feels like it's deserving.
Hank Azaria
#64. How blind and unreasoning and arbitrary are some of the laws of nature - the most of them, in fact!
Mark Twain
#65. It took us a long time to find out that we had been lied to by our parents' generation. The moralities that were followed during our parents' generation were basically arbitrary. This caused a rift between the two generations, which was brought on by the beatniks.
Peter Fonda
#66. It is, as she said, difficult to describe someone, since memories are by their nature fragmented, isolated, and arbitrary as glimpses one has at night through lighted windows.
Marilynne Robinson
#67. Now, if you believe that the universe is not arbitrary, but is governed by definite laws, you ultimately have to combine the partial theories into a complete unified theory that will describe everything in the universe.
Stephen Hawking
#68. Insecurity must follow the transfer of responsibility from self to others, particularly when transferred to arbitrary and capricious government. Genuine security is a matter of self-responsibility, based on the right to the fruits of one's own labor and freedom to trade.
Leonard Read
#69. What you don't see is scarier than what you do. Categorization is always kind of arbitrary, but people have called 'Preservation' a 'psychological thriller.' To me, psychological thriller basically means 'a horror movie without the blood.'
Christopher Denham
#70. The hypothesis is pretty; its only fault is that it is neither demonstrated nor demonstrable. Who does not see that this is purely arbitrary fiction that puts nothingness as existing and proposes nothing more than simple noncontradiciton?
Galileo Galilei
#71. Poetry is a very complex art ... It is an art of pure sound bound in through an art of arbitrary and conventional symbols.
Ezra Pound
#72. The universe and its design is often one of arbitrary horror.
Laird Barron
#73. Three months is an arbitrary amount of time. We could make it six months, a year? How long do you want it to be? What would make you comfortable? Tell me.
E.L. James
#74. A crassly arbitrary method can be avoided only when it is accepted that etymological statements are historical and not authoritative and that semantic statements must be based on the social linguistic consciousness related to usage.
James Barr
#75. Nothing important in this world is measured by grades. Intelligence, character, integrity, success, happiness - do you want these things, or do you want to struggle with the arbitrary difference between an A minus and a B plus?
Ryan Quinn
#76. I spend a quarter of every day inside you. When you set limits outside of that I can't help but see them as arbitrary.
Sylvia Day
#77. The line we draw between animals that are socially acceptable and those we find repugnant can be awfully arbitrary.
Alexandra Harney
#78. In discussing tradition, we are not discussing arbitrary rules and conventions. We are discussing answers that have been discovered to enduring questions. These
Roger Scruton
#79. It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age.
Margaret Mead
#80. Christmas Eve is my favorite ... I think the anticipation is more fun than anything else. I kind of lost that. The idea that something - food, traditions, an arbitrary date on the calendar - can be special because we decide it should be. We make it special. Not just for ourselves, but for others.
Kiersten White
#81. What is called a republic, is not any particular form of government ... it is naturally opposed to the word monarchy, which means arbitrary power.
Thomas Paine
#82. FCC power rests on ... nonobjective law (which) delivers men's lives, fortunes, careers, ambitions into the arbitrary power of a bureaucrat who can reward or punish at whim.
Ayn Rand
#83. The issue isn't gun control but state control
obtuse and arbitrary state control, state control run amok ... Forget guns. If Dr. Hudson, Mr. Turnbull, Dr. Gingrich and others end up in jail it won't be for their guns but our liberties.
George Jonas
#84. [C]ensorship in any form is the opening wedge for fascism, since it places arbitrary and unwarranted power in the hands of individuals.
Jack Parsons
#85. Rules are foolish, arbitrary, mindless things that raise you quickly to a level of acceptable mediocrity, then prevent you from progressing further.
Bruce Barnbaum
#86. Life is ruthless, and its bestowal of fortune arbitrary and capricious. I'd been born to morons, and mine was a shabby life.
M. J. Hyland
#87. The desire for liberty has also made itself felt as struggle against domestic tyranny or arbitrary rule.
Emily Greene Balch
#88. Virtue and vice are not arbitrary things; but there is a natural and eternal reason for goodness and virtue, and against vice and wickedness.
John Tillotson
#89. The student of mathematics must get rid of all arbitrary thinking and follow purely the demands of thought. In thinking in this way, the laws of the spiritual world flow into him. This regulated thinking leads to the most spiritual truths.
Rudolf Steiner
#90. 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.
Sara Harrison
#91. Spirit? Who is that fellow? And where do you know him from? Is he perhaps not merely an arbitrary and convenient hypostasis that you have not even defined, let alone deduced or proved? Do you think you have an audience of old women in front of you?
Arthur Schopenhauer
#92. If any man's money can be taken by a so-called government, without his own personal consent, all his other rights are taken with it; for with his money the government can, and will, hire soldiers to stand over him, compel him to submit to its arbitrary will, and kill him if he resists.
Lysander Spooner
#93. 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.
Peter Mullan
#94. Morality, then, is not a set of arbitrary regulations dictated by a vengeful deity and written down in a book; nor is it the custom of a particular culture or tribe. It is a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives and the opportunity the world provides for positive-sum games.
Steven Pinker
#95. Quite rightly, the public expects to see forces serving their communities, not chasing arbitrary targets.
Theresa May
#96. I wanted to make a movie about the arbitrary nature of love.
Adrian Lyne
#97. Adept as he was in the Hegelian dialectic - a system easy of abuse by those who seek to dominate thought by arbitrary flights of fancy and metaphysical verbosity - he was not slow in finding a way out of the dilemma in which socialists found themselves.
Ludwig Von Mises
#98. 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.
Ichiro Suzuki
#99. Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I see before me, I make an arbitrary use of color to express myself more forcefully.
Vincent Van Gogh
#100. Arbitrary rules teach kids discipline: If every rule made sense, they wouldn't be learning respect for authority, they'd be learning logic.
Stephen Colbert
