Quotes About Definition

It shouldn't be so difficult to determine what a planet is. When you're watching a science fiction show like 'Star Trek' and they show up at some object in space and turn on the viewfinder, the audience and the people in the show know immediately whether it's a planet or a star or a comet or an asteroid.

If you're watching a film on your television, is it no longer a film because you're not watching it in a theatre? If you watch a TV show on your iPad, is it no longer a TV show? The device and the length are irrelevant; the labels are useless, except perhaps to agents and managers and lawyers, who use these labels to conduct business deals.

The EPA has no legal authority to expand the definition of navigable waters under the Clean Water Act, as the Supreme Court has repeatedly made clear.

The one place where I do think our culture today has to be extremely careful is this whole thing about illegal aliens. Because any time you start defining a significant block of the population as 'others,' or as less than you, you start getting into dangerous waters.

Under the Clean Water Act, the federal government has jurisdiction over navigable waters - defined as the 'waters of the United States.' Federal regulators and the courts have broadened this definition over time, moving from waters a vessel can navigate to ponds and wetlands as well.

Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.

To say that what a planet is doesn't matter would be to imply that a planetary scientist couldn't explain to someone what the field is about.

The best opinion now is, that there are multitudinous forms which are not sufficiently differentiated to be distinctively either plant or animal, while, as respects ordinary plants and animals, the difficulty of laying down a definition has become far greater than ever before.

Please explain to me what being an icon is. How do you define it? I haven't been given a script. I don't know what the dialogues of an icon are.

I don't like mixed colors that much, like plum color or deep, deep colors that are hard to define.

Just because Pluto orbits with many other dwarf planets doesn't change what it is, just as whether an object is a mountain or not doesn't depend on whether it's in a group or in isolation.

I think a poet is anybody who wouldn't call himself a poet.

I hate being called poet/dramatist/translator/director. 'Poet' covers it all for me.

It's not easy to define poetry.

Science fiction is what we point to when we say it.

I don't really call myself a composer.

I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them.

There is nothing that's been in any of my novels that, in my view, hasn't been either illuminating surroundings or defining a character or moving a plot.

I do believe that any sort of electromagnetic energy that can be measured beyond the moment of death is, by the definition of energy, eternal. But I cop to the fact that calling it a 'soul' and presuming it sustains our consciousness in any form is, to put it kindly, a leap.

That is what I define as a novel: something that has a beginning, a middle and an end, with characters and a plot that sustain interest from the first sentence to the last. But that is not what I do at all.

The danger with playing a part that defines you is that it swallows up everything else.

The human mind is so complex and things are so tangled up with each other that, to explain a blade of straw, one would have to take to pieces an entire universe. A definition is a sack of flour compressed into a thimble.

Contact is not a verb and I said be brief." "Yes, sir. The last time you told me that I looked it up in the dictionary and I certainly don't want to contradict you but it says contact is a verb. Transitive or intransitive." "Contact is not a verb under this roof.

I mean, the first 'Back to the Future' is kind of a perfect script, I think, in terms of handling time travel the best. It depends on your definition. To me, that means it effectively uses it in the story.