Quotes About Definition

Words take on many different meanings.

I don't know what metalcore is. I know what rock n' roll is... It's not rocket science.

I am really not clear in my mind what a sanctuary city is.

I am a striker, and people expect strikers to score goals. But I don't see myself as a striker.

Miss America is a scholarship pageant, and they actually define themselves as a talent pageant.

As far as I'm concerned, the only difference between fact and what most people call fiction is about fifteen pages in the dictionary.

Twitter, it can be said, completely changed the way activism is done, who can participate, and even how we define it.

My ability to help my clients was limited by our narrow focus. This was partly my fault for defining myself as a specialist, but I eventually came to see that this problem of reductionism is endemic to our culture.

In God's family, success is defined as being faithful to his purpose and plan for your life.

Can we stipulate that or establish a convention that or make it true by definition that there is an object that has X, Y, and Z (and no other atoms) as parts? Let us ask what one might actually say in order to accomplish something along these lines.

Dogs are always going to come up short if you insist on defining them as a weird kind of cat.

but sociopaths don't blend in well." "Maybe the ones that get diagnosed don't, but by definition they're the bottom of the class. The others are too smart to get caught, and real automatons would do even better. Besides, when you get powerful enough, you don't need to act like other people. Other people start acting like you.

The more you want to explain about a black swan event like the storming of the Bastille," wrote the sociologist Duncan Watts, "the broader you have to draw the boundaries around what you consider to be the event itself.

It's always seemed odd to me that nonfiction is defined, not by what it is, but by what it is not. It is not fiction. But then again, it is also not poetry, or technical writing or libretto. It's like defining classical music as nonjazz.

feature of British society, yet it is difficult to define. In the United Kingdom, the term is employed in different senses. As the historian David Cannadine has argued, it can be used to denote social attitudes ("us" versus "them"), groupings in society based on occupation (upper, middle, and working), and hierarchy (in effect, status but not necessarily inherited, but rather earned or acquired, status).10 These distinctions are useful in making sense of how

Sartre intends to convey the view that man first exists without purpose or definition, finds himself in the world and only then, as a reaction to experience, defines the meaning of his life. It

She couldn't see the obvious lines of definition, that the female identity could not allow itself to be invaded, perverted, and compromised by brutish men - alien spirits really - whose sole purpose was to inject foreign matter in women and upon withdrawal take away bits of their souls. Men put in and took out, like giant mosquitoes.

You cannot be who and what you are unless you have a lifestyle, both internally and externally, that is designed to support that definition of self.

The precision of naming takes away from the uniqueness of seeing.

La définition la plus stricte et la plus restreinte de l'écrivain (etc.), que nous acceptons aujourd'hui comme allant de soi, est le produit d'une longue série d'exclusions ou d'excommunications visant à refuser l'existence en tant qu'écrivains dignes de ce nom à toutes sortes de producteurs qui pouvaient se vivre comme écrivains au nom d'une définition plus large et plus lâche de la profession.

champ de production culturelle est le lieu de luttes qui, à travers l'imposition de la définition dominante de l'écrivain, visent à délimiter la population de ceux qui sont en droit de participer à la lutte pour la définition de l'écrivain.

à la différence notamment du champ universitaire, par un très faible degré de codification et, du même coup, par l'extrême perméabilité de leurs frontières et l'extrême diversité de la définition des postes qu'ils offrent et, du même coup, des principes de légitimité qui s'y affrontent

And so with all things: names were vital and important.

I think the term 'friend' itself has lost almost all of its exclusivity. Even the term 'good friend' is overused. Adding the word 'vital' provides a clear definition of what we mean.