Quotes About Rules

Justice may be relentless, as Franklin says, but she's also hobbled by rules. That's why I choose vengeance. She's the only mistress I serve.

...talent and genius operate outside the rules, and theory conflicts with practice.

T]he elementary form of the mechanics of the world...does not need to mention 'time.' The world without a time variable is not a complicated one. It's a net of interconnected events, where the variables in play adhere to probabilistic rules that, incredibly, we know for a good part how to write. And it's a clear world, windswept and full of beauty as the crests of mountains; aridly beautiful as the cracked lips of the adolescent you loved.

Throughout her life, Mott criticized those who represented man-made rules as Divine truth, using religious authority to enforce their private interests and personal opinions.

I start sentences with ands and buts. I end sentences with prepositions.

Much of the appeal of dogma in religion is that it gives its followers rules to follow that rescue them from having to find out who they are and what they really think.

lack of leadership can have fearsome consequences. A dog's mental health, after all, depends to a large degree on leadership: dogs get enormously distressed when they think no one is in charge. Accordingly, it's not only nonsensical to fail to establish rules and limits with a dog...but cruel.

Yet economics purports to be strangely exempt from this fact of life. From Adam Smith's day to our own, the chief concern of the discipline has been to render economic events unsurprising...The discernment of orderly rules governing the apparent chaos of life was a remarkable achievement and continues to amaze.

One reason that religious prohibitions will probably never disappear is that we would deeply miss the glory we bestow upon ourselves for daring to violate the rules of an illustrious illusion we have imagined was an explanation of our existence.

Information on the Internet is subject to the same rules and regulations as conversation at a bar.

Jon shrugged. 'Girls get the arms but not the swords. Bastards get the swords but not the arms. I did not make the rules, little sister.

As an anonymous participant in financial markets, I never had to weigh the social consequences of my actions…. I felt justified in ignoring them on the grounds that I was playing by the rules.

The irony of this endeavor is palpable, for English itself is a hopeless hodgepodge of other tongues, with more exceptions than rules, more chaos than order, and enough new words created each day to keep the Oxford English Dictionary folks very, very busy.

IMHO, we groan at puns because we sense, deep in our souls, that there has been some egregious violation of the rules forbidding the base exploitation of language. Indeed, the pun is considered by many to be more distasteful than the common expletive. You might even say the pun is mightier than the s-word.

There are ten commandments, right? Well, it's like an exam. You get eight out of ten, you're just about top of the class.

The chess-board is the world; the pieces are the phenomena of the universe; the rules of the game are what we call the Laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.

Habits are safer than rules; you don't have to watch them. And you don't have to keep them, either; they keep you.

The rules of soccer are very simple. Basically it's this: If it moves, kick it; if it doesn't move, kick it until it does.

Of all modern notions, the worst is this: that domesticity is dull. Inside the home, they say, is dead decorum and routine; outside is adventure and variety. But the truth is that the home is the only place of liberty, the only spot on earth where a man can alter arrangements suddenly, make an experiment or indulge in a whim. The home is not the one tame place in a world of adventure; it is the one wild place in a world of rules and set tasks.

The joy of the young is to disobey - but the trouble is that there are no longer any orders.

The nature of love is that it catches you off-guard, subjects you to rules you have never faced, some of them contradictory.

I've always believed, she replied, that if God is going to be strict about anything, that He will be strict about the rules concerning hate, not love. And if two people love each other, that has to be better than two people hating each other. Beyond that, it's for God to sort out. I'm too frail to be such a judge. --Deaths of Jocasta

When can I drive the new ride?" "When you learn that a yellow light means haul ass to get through it before it turns red instead of slowing down to a crawl a half a block away.

Justice doesn't hide behind anonymity. It doesn't operate without rules of conduct.