Quotes About Definition

Nor does the atomic nature of word meanings mean that people are ignorant of the information traditionally plunked into their definitions.

We have come a long way to arrive at an age in which one-pound preemies are rescued with heroic surgery, children are not expected to be economically productive until their fourth decade, and violence against children has been defined down to dodgeball.

The best definition comes from the linguist Max Weinreich: a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

A definition is a dictionary's explanation of the meaning of an English word using other English words, intended to be read by a whole person, applying the entirety of his or her intelligence and language skills.

God is love, but He also defines what love is. We don't have the license to define love according to our standards.

I think being someone in love is so hard to define, so temporary, because retrospectively we often deny the state in which we were in love.

Love is a continual interrogation. I don't know of a better definition of love.

I know of no better definition of love than the one given by Proust - Love is space and time measured by the heart.

Imagine how much easier it would be for us to learn how to love if we began with a shared definition.

Women select men. That makes them nature, because nature is what selects. And you can say "Well it's only symbolic that women are nature", it's like no, it's not just symbolic. The woman is the gatekeeper to reproductive success. And you can't get more like nature than that, in fact it's the very definition of nature.

Being of any reasonable sort appears to require limitation.

Freud, as we noted, attempted to reduce motivation to sexuality, to libido. The same can be done quite effectively by anyone sufficiently literate, intelligent, and verbally fluent. This is because "sexuality" (like any multifaceted single term) can be defined as tightly or as loosely as necessary by those who use it for comprehensively explanatory purposes.

Why refuse to specify? Because while you are failing to define success (and thereby rendering it impossible) you are also refusing to define failure, to yourself, so that if and when you fail you won't notice, and it won't hurt.

Only man will inflict suffering for the sake of suffering. That is the best definition of evil I have been able to formulate.

before a problem can be solved it must be formulated precisely.

biologists have been arguing for decades about the definition of "life" (the zombie-rights activists are a powerful lobby group),

Describir nunca es bastante.

Nunca se ha empleado, en cambio, el término «capitalismo», que era el que usaban para definirlo sus enemigos del llamado bando socialista. Incluso hoy, al cabo de tantos años de acabada la guerra fría, se mantiene el tabú:

To meet this many-headed Hydra, the president claims he—and he alone—must have the flexibility to define the enemy as he sees fit, and to act against it no matter what form it takes.

The absence of theistic belief... { Defining the word 'atheism' }

We need uniform protection of traditional marriage. You can't have different definitions on something as fundamental as marriage. The Marriage Protection Amendment is the only solution to this problem.

Intentions must mature into commitments if we are to become persons with definition, with character, with substance.

The only philosophy worth pursuing is the one that poses questions without answers. Anything less is hubris. But this can never be proved – by definition.

In a way, I think science is the modern religion, and at times, I despise it as much as I despise other religions because it really will only accept stuff that fits its masculine ability to define the world.