Quotes About Definition

Men have been adjudicating on what women are, and how they should behave, for millennia through the institutions of social control such as religion, the medical profession, psychoanalysis, the sex industry. Feminists have fought to remove the definition of what a woman is from these masculine institutions and develop their own understandings.

We are dealing in a day and time when the courts are defining sin different than the church.

A patent, or invention, is any assemblage of technologies or ideas that you can put together that nobody put together that way before. That's how the patent office defines it. That's an invention

Labels helped identify a person, perhaps, but they did not define him. Or her.

What I mean is that public speaking and oratory were not merely things that ancient women didn't do: they were exclusive practices and skills that defined masculinity as a gender.

Sooner or later every writer evolves his own definition of a story. Mine is: A reflection of life plus beginning and end (life seems not to have either) and a meaning.

It is the one time Dante calls such explicit attention to the idea of contrapasso-a word for which we have no exact translation, no precise definition in English, because the word in itself is its definition... Well, my dear Longfellow, I would say countersuffering ... the notion that each sinner must be punished by continuing the damage of his own sin against him... just as these Schismatics are cut apart...

When you have enough power and money, you can dictate the meanings of words.

The essay I had to read was called, An Essay on Criticism by Alexander Pope. The first challenge was that the essay was, in fact, a very long poem in heroic couplets. If something is called an essay, it should be an essay.

I had to originate a philosophical framework of my own, because my basic view of man and existence was theories. In order to define, explain and present my concept of man, I had to become a philosopher in the specific meaning of the term.

2. To facilitate the acceptance of force, the Berkeley rebels attempted to establish a special distinction between force and violence: force, they claimed explicitly, is a proper form of social action, but violence is not. Their definition of the terms was as follows: coercion by means of a literal physical contact is "violence" and is reprehensible; any other way of violating rights is merely "force" and is a legitimate, peaceful method of dealing with opponents.

Dios es aquello que la mente humana no puede concebir, afirman, y luego os piden que consideréis tal cosa como conocimiento; Dios no es hombre, el cielo no es tierra, el alma no es el cuerpo, la virtud no es provecho, A no es A, la percepción no es sensorial, el conocimiento no es rázon. Sus definiciones no constituyen el acto de definir, sino el de borrar.

They keep telling you what it is not, but never tell you what it is.

Anything means something if you impose meaning on it, which in itself is a meaningless thing, the imposition.

But there are some rare terms that simply don't have satisfactory, simple words that adequately express the same thing, and the word hypostasis (plural: hypostases) is one of them.

We hear a lot about identity theft when someone takes your wallet and pretends to be you and uses your credit cards. But the more serious identity theft is to get swallowed up in other people's definition of you.

Hang up the phone on a vampire, the definition of carefree.

I like to include you in the definition of me . - Danny Daniels

Question: How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Answer: Four; calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg. —Abraham Lincoln

We tend not to realise the extent to which we make up … the world, that is, the world of relative truths. We set boundaries, we make definitions. We determine what is good, what is bad, what ought to be, and what ought not to be – all out of inclinations of our mind.

The more independent the subsystems are, the more you make it safe to focus on one bit of complexity at a time. Carefully defined objects separate concerns so that you can focus on one thing at a time. Packages provide the same benefit at a higher level of aggregation.

Commitmentphobics tend to resist being defined by a job or a career, even when they are successful. An example of this is the lawyer/writer who teaches and plays in a jazz band weekends. The bottom line is that they always want to feel that the possibility exists that they can get out from any job situation, should they want to. Some want to fairly often.

The meaning of a word, then, seems to consist of information stored in the heads of the people who know the word: the elementary concepts that define it and, for a concrete word, an image of what it refers to.

Now, if concepts are undefinable, that means they aren't built out of more elementary concepts, which means they must themselves be elementary concepts, which means they must be innate.