Quotes About Definitions

Law builds upon and, I should like to claim, is one of the liberal arts. It uses words of persuasion and changing definitions for practical ends.

Don't push back. Keep asking questions. Insist on drilling down to definitions ("Define Star Trek"), details, and sources. And see if you can outlast your bullying opponent. If you can—if he walks away exasperated—then, despite all I've written about previously…you win.

To make dictionaries is dull work.

The more discrete the skills are, the easier it is to develop operational definitions of them. When the skills can be operationalized, it's easier to create interventions to improve those operations. For

In other words, Cantor is able to show that real numbers themselves can serve as the limits of fundamental sequences of reals, meaning his system of definitions is self-enclosed and VIR-proof.

My favorite class as an undergraduate was a political theory class on justice. Now, 'justice' is hardly a self-defining term, and much smarter men than I have developed various definitions over the centuries. The class put Plato at one end and Nietzsche at the other, and off we went.

So different groups have different definitions, and then they clash on those. So it takes adept leadership to say we're going to work through these.

Let's step back from this debate and consider how it affects the question we are currently investigating, the role of war in the rise of archaic states. While there is confusion resulting from competing definitions, and a great degree of controversy about evidence and how to interpret it, all parties agree on one thing: warfare was particularly vicious among pre-state farming societies.

Definitions from Mulla Do-Piaza Drugs: Source of the mystical experience of the ignorant.

Definitions from Mulla Do-Piaza Emotionalist: A man or woman who thinks he has experienced the divine.

God wants us to recognize good as good, evil as evil, and never confuse the two. Individuals and societies become wicked in the sight of God when they pervert justice and ethics by confusing or even reversing the definitions of good and evil.

traditionalists have already equivocated on fundamental definitions of key terms like translation and revelation. Clearly, there are other ways to construe the evidence, even for traditionalists.

Although it may be true that the notion of teaching virtues such as honesty or integrity arouses little controversy, it is also true that vague consensus on the goodness of these virtues conceals a great deal of actual disagreement over their definitions.

It is all too easy to accept emotions as primitive "givens" and proceed toward a superficial understanding based on words, arbitrary definitions, and the quiddities of logic rather than biology.

After modest study of the underlying issues, one can understand why scientists must be conservative with their concepts. In order to make real scientific progress, as opposed to merely generating creative ideas, we must seek rigorous definitions for the concepts we use. All key concepts should be defined in clear and consistent ways, and they must be deployed experimentally (operationally) in ways that help us predict new behavioral acts.

There's no such thing as an unabridged dictionary.

While these terms — Bolshevik, Communist, Marxist, socialist, and Soviet — are sometimes used interchangeably, many people have died to make distinctions among them.

The dictionary definitions of words you are trying to replace are far more likely to help you out than a scattershot wad from a thesaurus.

The definitions of the Church are the rules of true faith.

It is rather easy to complicate life with various, beautiful, fancy definitions than to live simple dignified life with no space for corrections.

How have we learned to look at those women who exercise power, or who try to? What are the cultural underpinnings of misogyny in politics or the workplace, and its forms (what kind of misogyny, aimed at what or whom, using what words or images, and with what effects)? How and why do the conventional definitions of 'power' (or for that matter of 'knowledge', 'expertise' and 'authority') that we carry round in our heads exclude women?

The images of peace are ephemeral. The language of peace is subtle. The reasons for peace, the definitions of peace, the very idea of peace have to be invented, and invented again

Words matter, especially words defining complicated political arrangements, because they shape perceptions of the events of the past, attitudes toward policies being carried out in the present, and expectations about desirable directions for the future.

Want to guarantee nasty conflicts? Take a word with multiple, fuzzy, definitions, force people to strike an agreement on it, attach large amounts of money to it, and then watch them fight about it a year or two later.