Quotes About Arbitrary

In a post-Enlightenment world we have tasked ourselves to identify what's meaningful and what's not, an exercise that can seem arbitrary and induce a creeping nihilism.

In a post-Enlightenment world we have tasked ourselves to identify what's meaningful and what's not, an exercise that can seem arbitrary and induce a creeping nihilism. "The Enlightenment's metaphysical embrace of the autonomous individual leads not just to a boring life," Dreyfus and Kelly worry; "it leads almost inevitably to a nearly unlivable one.

It's always easy to explain the unknown by postulating a superhuman and arbitrary will.

We are fighting to vindicate the principle that small nationalities are not to be crushed, in defiance of international good faith, by the arbitrary will of a strong and overmastering Power.

Terrorists can endanger some of us, but the war on terror endangers us all. How much more can the Constitution be diminished before it is completely replaced by arbitrary government power?

Everybody right now, they look at the current technology, and they think, 'OK, that's what artificial neural nets are.' And they don't realize how arbitrary it is. We just made it up! And there's no reason why we shouldn't make up something else.

The entire notion of biography is grounded in the arbitrary ascription of a causal relation between specified traits and subsequent events.

The entire notion of biography is grounded in the arbitrary ascription of a causal relation between specified traits and subsequent events. Now

I have always hated employment and the associated dependence on someone else's arbitrary opinion

Her sureness was based on the power to limit experience arbitrarily. Moreover, his confusion was significant, whereas her order was not.

But birthdays are random... Defining one's life by the day one was cut from an umbilical cord is completely arbitrary.

This is your poetry. Join the network to discover new ways of making meaning. Do not fixate on poem, voice, other striated and arbitrary meaning formations. We offer a processual, unbounded methodology that can be applied to any language and can include all languages.

I was much struck how entirely vague and arbitrary is the distinction between species and varieties. ... But to discuss whether they are rightly called species or varieties, before any definition of these terms has been generally accepted, is vainly to beat the air.

Life is ruthless, and its bestowal of fortune arbitrary and capricious. I'd been born to morons, and mine was a shabby life.

In particular, like all physical quantities, volume may not assume arbitrary values, but only certain particular ones, as I described in chapter 4. The list of all possible values is called, recall, the "spectrum." Hence, there should exist a "spectrum of the volume" (figure 6.2).

If a heart could fail in its pumping, a lung in its breathing, then why not a brain in its thinking, rendering the world forever askew, like a television with bad reception? And couldn't a brain fail as arbitrarily as any one of these other parts, without regard to the blessing and cosseting that, everyone was so eager to remind you, disentitled you from unhappiness?

How arbitrary, this distinction of time. How like humans to have to cut the infinite down to something they could believe they controlled.

The great triumph of the Sixties was to dramatize just how arbitrary and constructed the seeming normality of the Fifties had been. We rose up from our maple-wood twin beds and fell onto the great squishy, heated water bed of the Sixties.

The desire for liberty has also made itself felt as struggle against domestic tyranny or arbitrary rule.

The sovereign is called a tyrant who knows no laws but his caprice.

'Reversible Errors' is about the limits of the law to define who committed ultimate evil, to define what ultimate evil is, to allow the million arbitrary factors to make this a meaningful punishment, and finally to say, 'Are we really accomplishing what we wanted to accomplish? Are those anxieties relieved?' I don't think so.

The choices politicians make must be based on values - not an arbitrary, axe-wielding approach to public spending or a dismal exchange between Gordon Brown and David Cameron about percentages that sounds like an argument between different book-keepers.

Luck doesn't shine her light on each of us equally. She is arbitrary, irrational, unfair and sometimes downright cruel.

Understand that legal and illegal are political, and often arbitrary, categorizations; use and abuse are medical, or clinical, distinctions.