Quotes About Rules

hadn't yet gotten either item through Congress—mainly because, on my very first day in office, I hadn't had the foresight to tell Harry Reid and the rest of the Senate Democrats to revise the chamber rules and get rid of the filibuster once and for all.

I started thinking about the struggles and disappointments he had seen in his life. I started to appreciate his need to feel respected in his own home. I realized that abiding by his rules would cost me little, but for him it would mean a lot. I recognized that sometimes he really did have a point, and that in insisting on getting my own way all the time, without regard to his feeling s or needs, I was in some way diminishing myself.

I was discovering, the difficulty of competing in a game where there were no clearly defined rules, a game in which your opponents are not merely trying to put a ball through a basket or push it across your goal line, but are instead trying to convince the broad public—at least implicitly, more often explicitly—that in matters of judgment, intelligence, values, and character, they are more worthy than you.

This came as a strange letdown, to see how the game always went to those who knew the rules without understanding the lesson.

First was the fewer, not less. Now it was the care in avoiding a preposition at the end of a sentence. An educated man, presumably. Precise. Apparently fussy about small-minded rules, perhaps to compensate for a willingness to ignore large ones.

when faced with overwhelming choice, we are forced to become "pickers," which is to say, relatively passive selectors from whatever is available. Being a chooser is better, but to have the time to choose more and pick less, we must be willing to rely on habits, customs, norms, and rules to make some decisions automatic.

in fact it is very difficult to find any instance in which he actually did what the law forbade. What he violated was the understanding and interpretation of the law by other Jewish leaders of his day, especially the Pharisees, who had developed complex rules to be adopted in order to be sure the law was kept.

The Pharisees were not hypocritical in developing these rules: they simply believed that one should do everything possible to do what God had required and so formulated policies to help make that happen.)

I'm convinced that too often parents are also trapped in the management paradigm, thinking of control, efficiency, and rules instead of direction, purpose, and family feeling. And leadership is even more lacking in our personal lives. We're into managing with efficiency, setting and achieving goals before we have even clarified our values.

in an artificial social system such as school, you may be able to get by if you learn how to manipulate the man-made rules, to "play the game.

I'm convinced that too often parents are also trapped in the management paradigm, thinking of control, efficiency, and rules instead of direction, purpose, and family feeling.

A government of the people, by the people, and for the people should live under the same rules it passes for the people. ... How can the American people trust Congress to fix a broken Washington when the people in Congress don't even live under the same rules as everybody else.

Forgiveness is at the very heart of the Christian faith. It's not about getting better, becoming more religious, or following the rules so God will love you. It's all about forgiveness, dummy! Everything else is secondary. If we don't keep the main thing the main thing, then everything else will turn sour on us.

The underlying message of all these rules is that inheritance tends to work against the primary technical imperative you have as a programmer, which is to manage complexity. For the sake of controlling complexity, you should maintain a heavy bias against inheritance.

If the pirate articles were clear about anything, it was that the act of dividing up the booty was as close to a sacrament as anything else in the code.

Proxy rules: A "proxy" is a document in which the shareholder appoints someone (typically management) to cast his vote for one or more specified actions.

One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with human language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology.

When it comes to correct English, there's no one in charge; the lunatics are running the asylum.

The word 'glamour' comes from the word 'grammar', and since the Chomskyan revolution the etymology has been fitting. Who could not be dazzled by the creative power of the mental grammar, by its ability to convey an infinite number of thoughts with a finite set of rules?

To make decisions "rationally," by some set of rules, means to base the decisions on some grounds of truth:

So if the language is our guide, the lofty declaration of abstract principles is really a story with a strange and clunky plot. Some people are hanging beneath some other people, connected by cords. As stuff flows by, something forces the lower people to cut the cords and stand beside the upper people, which is what the rules require. They see some onlookers, and clear away the onlookers' view of what forced them to do the cutting.

Steven Alm, a judge who devised a "probation with enforcement" program, summed up the reason for the program's success: "When the system isn't consistent and predictable, when people are punished randomly, they think, My probation officer doesn't like me, or, Someone's prejudiced against me, rather than seeing that everyone who breaks a rule is treated equally, in precisely the same way.

To show that these rules really are parts of a language engine, one needs to show that they mesh with other mechanisms of language, particularly in ways that would leave common sense and the desire to communicate frustrated.

For example, there is an old grammarian's saw about how a sentence can end in five prepositions. Daddy trudges upstairs to Junior's bedroom to read him a bedtime story. Junior spots the book, scowls, and asks, "Daddy, what did you bring that book that I don't want to be read to out of up for?