Quotes About Rules

I'm in favor of immigration but we also need rules.

Market forces impose certain rules before a film can actually get made.

It doesn't really matter how much of the rules or the dogma we accepted and lived by if we're not really living by the fundamental creed of the Catholic Church, which is service to others and finding God in ourselves and then seeing God in everyone - including our enemies.

There's so much that we just accept, but the reasons behind how certain rules came to be are so fascinating and funny, it just increases your affection for language.

There are a lot of rules in cities that were designed to protect a particular incumbent, but not to move a city's constituents, a city's citizens, and the city itself, forward. And that's a problem.

Wie Alice im Wunderland ist sie auf die andere Seite des Lebens gelangt, dorthin, wo die von oben diktierten Gesetze keine Gültigkeit mehr haben.

Science would be ruined if (like sports) it were to put competition above everything else, and if it were to clarify the rules of competition by withdrawing entirely into narrowly defined specialties. The rare scholars who are nomads-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines.

Heuristics are fast and frugal rules of thumb used to simplify complex decisions. The word has its origin in the ancient Greek word Eureka!, the cry of joy and satisfaction when one finds or discovers something.

Memories haunt. So do fears that you don't know half the things you are supposed to know since your name now sits on the jackets of some books. I had come to books in autodidact fashion, with a handful of workshops tossed in. What course could I teach? What were to be the rules? From what hollow in what bone was I to extract the necessary charm, the more necessary authority? I had no mystique and no defense against my own uncertainty and yet months of indecision melted into yes.

Where, in Heaven's name, could anyone even be alone in Calcutta? What hanky-panky business, in my mother's words, could go on? Everyone knew the rules and the rules stated caste and community narrowed the range of intimate contact.

The three principles of a French plate are color, volume, and texture. They are rules of presentation. If your dish uses color strategically, volume (i.e., has height), and texture (mixes soft and hard, or juicy and crunchy), then it will appeal to a diner.

Terrorism has no rules except to effect terror. And that is why I wrote the book I did, based on experience and what I thought I understood of the way politics works. And terrorism is politics, no matter how extreme.

My wife makes 99% of the rules in our house, but one rule I insisted on, when the kids were small, is that I wasn't going to have "pets" in the house that aren't really pets. Fish, birds, cats, dogs… that's fine. No spiders, ferrets, snakes, gerbils, hamsters; if you would kill the thing if it came into the house on its own, that's not a pet.

The trouble with referees is that they know the rules, but they don't know the game.

I try not to break the rules, but merely to test their elasticity.

Baseball is almost the only orderly thing in a very unorderly world. If you get three strikes, even the best lawyer in the world can't get you off.

Sports teaches you character, it teaches you to play by the rules, it teaches you to know what it feels like to win and lose-it teaches you about life.

I went to grad school because I wanted to learn the rules so I would know how to break them. Breaking the rules is saying, 'I'm breaking in, OK? I'm breaking in your very comfortable little house over here, and I'm going to take a room.'

Cornish wrestling was very different from that in Devon - it was less brutal, as no kicking was allowed.

I guess you could say I fell into it. The main goal was to be successful and to make my family proud. Back then, MMA was just getting started, and there didn't seem to be a ton of rules. It seemed pretty brutal, and I was still pretty focused on wrestling. But I decided to give it a shot.

A funny thing about film is that it's the only medium where people say there are really rules that you have to stick to. Nobody says to the writer - in a film you've got to have three acts - there's a character arc you have to do - there's no reason that's true.

In history, one gathers clues like a detective, tries to present an honest account of what most likely happened, and writes a narrative according to what we know and, where we aren't absolutely sure, what might be most likely to have happened, within the generally accepted rules of evidence and sources.

Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.

In no way am I demeaning writing or any other form of art because it's popular. What I'm saying is that anything fed into the industrial machinery to comply with rules of size and length and shelf-life has a hard time surviving as art.