Quotes About Arbitrary

Wise men wrote the Constitution, but clever judges have been destroying it, bit by bit, turning it into an instrument of arbitrary judicial power, instead of a limitation on all government power.

Shall we then say, like Newton, that all such truths are made arbitrarily by God? Shall we seek such truths in the occult? For if God has laid these rules down arbitrarily, then they are occult by nature. To me this notion is offensive; it seems to cast God in the rôle of a capricious despot who desires to hide the truth from us.

With the 5-to-4 decision upholding Trump's Muslim ban, arbitrary discrimination is now formal U.S. policy, celebrated by a president who campaigned on a 'total ban' of Muslims entering the United States.

National borders have always been arbitrarily drawn by people, and in ancient times there was a lot of exchange of people and culture with the continent.

The essence of tyranny is not iron law. It is capricious law.

It may be that... you recognize something of yourself in these instances... a disposition to resistance... against arbitrary authority or witless mass opinion

If you will pardon my arbitrary, presumptuous use of the first person plural, then allow me to put it this way: unable to find any ultimate meaning we feel crushed enough already to be fed up with a literature that pretends there is such a thing and keeps hinting at some ultimate meaning.

In 1945, two fumbling mid-ranking American officers who knew nothing about the country used a National Geographic map as reference to arbitrarily cut a border to make North and South Korea, a division that eventually separated millions of families, including my own grandmother from her family.

Every established order tends to make its own entirely arbitrary system seem entirely natural." —Pierre Bourdieu1

Her searches after knowledge were arbitrary and without context. It was as if she were shining a small flashlight of curiosity into the dark room of the world.

What was it about disfigurement, however arbitrary the source, that led the mind to underestimate, even dismiss the victim …

Chang despised authority on principle, for even when veiled by the rubric of practical necessity or the weight of tradition he could not see institutional power as anything but an expression of arbitrary personal will, and it galled him profoundly.

Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.

Custine described them as 'automata inconvenienced with a soul': a description true, perhaps, of all bureaucrats fearful for their jobs but truest of all where power is both arbitrary and completely centralised, as it was in Russia.

In the light of the world's attitude toward woman and her duties, the nature of Carrie's mental state deserves consideration. Actions such as hers are measured by an arbitrary scale. Society possesses a conventional standard whereby it judges all things. All men should be good, all women virtuous. Wherefore, villain, hast thou failed?

Every language has a grammar, a set of rules that govern usage and meaning, and literary language is no different. It's all more or less arbitrary of course, just like language itself.

In the war I was subject to military law, but subject to law nevertheless; now I am at the mercy of an arbitrary power.

Magellan seemed a remote, imperious figure, authoritarian and arbitrary, a man whose every word was law

La memoria es una traductora simultánea que interpreta los recuerdos al azar o siguiendo un orden arbitrario: nadie puede manipular el recuerdo y quien crea que pueda es aquel que está más a merced del arbitrio de la memoria.

Laws fixed, certain, and uniform, are said to be the distinguishing traits of civilized from savage communities. In these last, seldom are any laws, unless it be the arbitrary and uncertain will of the strongest.

I make a distinction between manners and etiquette - manners as the principles, which are eternal and universal, etiquette as the particular rules which are arbitrary and different in different times, different situations, different cultures.

You can build a statistical model and that's all well and good, but if you're dealing with a new type of financial instrument, for example, or a new type of situation - then the choices you're making are pretty arbitrary in a lot of respects.

The fundamental question of classical political philosophy is whether there are some conventions (nomoi) which are natural, i.e., whose force is not due simply to arbitrary human invention.

Arbitrarily changing the time each year makes no sense, and results in significant economic burdens for businesses, including those in NC-11.