Quotes About Definitions

Beauty and sexuality are both commonly misunderstood as some transcendent inevitable fact; falsely interlocking the two makes it seem doubly true that a woman must be beautiful to be sexual. That of course is not true at all. The definitions of both beautiful and sexual constantly change to serve the social order, and the connection between the two is a recent invention.

I am a girl of definitions, of logic, of black and white.

Who, after all, is in favor of unfairness? Similarly with "social justice," "equality," and other undefined terms that can mean wholly different things to different individuals and groups—all of whom can be mobilized in support of policies that use such appealing words.

Definitions being what they are, young people who waste their time around the house or on street corners are called "unemployed," while those who waste their time in classrooms are called "students.

I have my own definitions of success. And I have my own definitions of country music that, luckily, I share with more people than I realized before.

There ought to be a dictionary of smiles; somewere you can look them up and find out what they mean.

Utopia confronts reality not with a measured assessment of the possibilities of change but with the demand for change. 'This is the way the world should be.' It refuses to accept current definitions of the possible because it knows these to be part of the reality that it seeks to change... Wilde was right: 'A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at.

A lot of people use the dictionary to find out how to spell words.

The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.

Anyone who sits in our jails who is not just a criminal but what we call a terrorist, with or without blood on his hands - and these definitions are also unclear to me - should not be sitting in our custody.

Greek was very much a live language, and a language still unconscious of grammar, not, like ours, dominated by definitions and trained upon dictionaries.

Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaFlattery:One of the most promising of businesses: always brisk.

Knowledge isn't truth. It's just mindless agreement. You agree with me, I agree with someone else - we all have knowledge. We haven't come any closer to the truth. You can never understand anything by agreeing, by making definitions. Only by turning over the possibilities. That's called thinking. If I say "I know", I stop thinking. As long as I keep thinking, I come to understand. That way, I might approach some truth.

Another problem with the official definitions of terror is that it follows from them that the US is a leading terrorist state.

If someday I make a dictionary of definitions wanting single words to head them, a cherished entry will be To abridge, expand, or otherwise alter or cause to be altered for the sake of belated improvement, one's own writings in translation.

Chaos and instability, concepts only beginning to acquire formal definitions, were not the same at all. A chaotic system could be stable if its particular brand of irregularity persisted in the face of small disturbances.

I honestly don't know what criteria makes someone right-wing or left-wing anymore. The boundaries of those definitions seem to be in a state of flux. I'm not socialist, I know that.

The battle for the world is the battle for definitions.

Although the legal and ethical definitions of right are the antithesis of each other, most writers use them as synonyms. They confuse power with goodness, and mistake law for justice.

My son, who's on the spectrum is a very rigid thinker. He needs clear-cut definitions of right and wrong. Anything hazy or gray confuses him. For instance, if I try to get him to see that a friend behaved badly, he'll often get upset with me because a friend is a 'good guy' by definition, in his book.

My definitions of comedy, drama, and straight man are all blurry for me. I don't think of it in those terms.

The Dictionary's definitions of 'Whig' and 'Tory' are well known. 'Whig' is 'the name of a faction', whereas 'Tory' is 'one who adheres to the ancient constitution of the state, and the apostolical hierarchy of the Church of England, opposed to a Whig'. This leaves one in little doubt of Johnson's political allegiance.

Where the makers of modern dictionaries strive for uniformity, Johnson was quite happy to vary the size of his entries. Although some of his definitions of natural phenomena are lean, many are lengthy, even opulent, reflecting the contemporary love affair with unusual flora and fauna. Here more than anywhere he strays towards an encyclopedic approach, and the Dictionary begins to resemble, at least fleetingly, a herbal and a bestiary.

There was not, and there never had been, a legal government by Europeans anywhere in the Americas. Not by any definition, not even by the Europeans' own definitions and laws. Because no legal government could be established on stolen land.