Quotation Explorer - 'Arbitrary'

One look around us ought to show that all our arbitrary measures and bounds have been clamped on us by mankind.
It violates right order whenever capital so employees the working or wage-earning classes as to divert business and economic activity entirely to its own arbitrary will and advantage without, the social character of economic life, social justice, and the common good. - Pope Pius XI
I value my privacy, and if sometimes my actions seem strange or arbitrary or capricious, I do not want them challenged. - George R.R. Martin
Science, like nothing else among the institutions of mankind, grows like a weed every year. Art is subject to arbitrary fashion, religion is inwardly focused and driven only to sustain itself, law shuttles between freeing us and enslaving us. - Kary Mullis
As one judge said to another judge: be just. And if you can’t be just, be arbitrary - William S. Burroughs
Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles. - George Jean Nathan
Atheism may be defined as the mental attitude which unreservedly accepts the supremacy of reason and aims at establishing a lifestyle and ethical outlook verifiable by experience and the scientific method, independent of all arbitrary assumptions of authority and creeds. - Madalyn Murray O'Hair
To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success...with a society that provides opportunities for all. - Malcolm Gladwell
Liberals tend to view traditions, policies, and morals of past generations as arbitrary designs put in place by less enlightened people. Because of this, liberals don't pay much attention to why traditions developed or wonder about possible ramifications of their social engineering. - John Hawkins
A cop's JOB is to violently enforce upon the rest of us whatever arbitrary bullshit the political parasites declare to be "law." It is, therefore, impossible to be a "law enforcer" and behave morally, for the same reason one can't be a moral car-jacker. - Larken Rose
Arbitrary power is like most other things which are very hard, very liable to be broken. - Abigail Adams
The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting. - Henry James
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
Ineffective leadership, is the plight of followers who anoint power to the autocratic persons who's visions are not founded but are rather arbitrary in their nature. - Wayne Chirisa
Lex Rex has become Rex Lex. Arbitrary judgment concerning current sociological good is king - Francis A. Schaeffer
The very term ‘public utility’ is an absurd one. Every good is useful ‘to the public,’ and almost every good may be considered ‘necessary.’ Any designation of a few industries as ‘public utilities’ is completely arbitrary and unjustified. - Murray N. Rothbard
The Christian worldview, contra-postmodernism, understands language not as a Self-referential, merely human and ultimately arbitrary system of signs that is reducible to contingent cultural factors, but it has the gift of a rational God entrusted to beings made in his own image and likeness. - Douglas Groothuis
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
Understand that legal and illegal are political, and often arbitrary, categorizations; use and abuse are medical, or clinical, distinctions. - Abbie Hoffman
Time is just something that we assign. You know, past, present, it's just all arbitrary. Most Native Americans, they don't think of time as linear; in time, out of time, I never have enough time, circular time, the Stevens wheel. All moments are happening all the time. - Robin Green and Mitchell Burgess
There can be no greater stretch of arbitrary power than 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. - Isabel Paterson
I don't think it really matters whether parents are strict or lenient, as long as they're consistent. Kids can live with more or less any set of rules so long as they know what they are. It's arbitrary tyranny that gets them mixed up. - Ken Follett
A language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols by means of which a social group cooperates. - Bernard Bloch
Strength we think to be a virtue in government, but we do not find our defense against disintegration either in arbitrary or in very great power. Indeed, we are inclined to see in both these the symptoms of an already advanced decay - Michael Oakeshott
You can't distinguish your group by doing things that are rational and believing things that are true. If you want to set yourself apart from other people you have to do things that are arbitrary and believe things that are false. - Paul Graham
Personally, I believe Young Adult to be an arbitrary title that means the book "Can be enjoyed by anyone/Has a main character who’s not quite an adult/Isn’t really boring. - Shannon Hale
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