Quotes About Arbitrary

I didn't want to write a biographie romancee especially since I already write novels, nor did I want to challenge the rules of the biography game, arbitrary as those rules might be.

They were saying computers deal with numbers. This was absolutely nonsense. Computers deal with arbitrary information of any kind.

He said he did not like her. Yet he was keen to know about her. Well, he should put himself to the test. She believed that there were in him desired for higher things, and desires for lower, and that the desire for the higher would conquer. At any rate, he should try. She forget that her 'higher' and 'lower' were arbitrary.

she felt in her mind the consciousness that she was entitled to hold a higher rank from her merit, than the arbitrary despotism of religious prejudice permitted her to aspire to.

Disease was more powerful than armies. Disease was more arbitrary than terrorism. Disease was crueler than human imagination. And yet young people like these doctors were willing to stand in the way of the most fatal force that nature has to offer.

For all actions merge one into the other, and none are truly independent; and all units merge one into the other, and all boundaries shift, and are arbitrarily chosen. Boundaries are the results of the limitations of perception, for a unit seems to end where perception of it ceases.

The evidence is overwhelming that it should be deemed as such: solitary confinement in the U.S. is arbitrary, abused, and unnecessary in many situations. It is cruel, degrading, and inhumane and is effectively a 'no touch' torture.

The Dinakaran episode has brought to the surface the vexed problem of the arbitrary and totally unsatisfactory manner of selecting and appointing judges as well as the unresolved problem of dealing with complaints of misconduct and corruption against judges.

It is a dark, unspoken truth that the powerful - the 'ruling class' - make up the rules as they go along.

Oracles in Thucydides reveal not the gods' plan for the world but humanity's capacity to fool itself that the arbitrary processes of fortune are somehow predestined.

In reality, the apparent 'objectivity' of modern architecture is merely a mysticism in reverse, a congealed sentimentality disguised as objectivity; moreover one has seen often enough just how quickly this attitude is converted, in its protagonists, into the most changeable and arbitrary of subjectivisms.

Monsieur Lisieux would seek to arbitrarily carve up Europe into units based on the alleged blood kinship of its inhabitants, regardless of what all historical and legal precedent say, to speak nothing of simple convenience…" - Letter from a Concerned Gentleman #35, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough – published 1804, later mockingly quoted in The North Briton, 1810   *

The practice of arbitrary imprisonments have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.

I am really sorry to see my Countrymen trouble themselves about Politics. If Men were Wise, the Most arbitrary Princes could not hurt them. If they are not wise, the Freest Government is compell'd to be a Tyranny. Princes appear to me to be Fools. Houses of Commons & Houses of Lords appear to me to be fools; they seem to me to be something Else besides Human life.

Laws of motion of any kind only become comprehensible to man when he can examine arbitrarily selected units of that motion. But at the same time it is this arbitrary division of continuous motion into discontinuous units which give rise to a large proportion of human error.

Behold the gates of mercy in arbitrary space.

I don't believe that intelligence can be reduced to a number, frankly. But I can see how doing exactly that produces a useful sorting mechanism in our society in order to separate children into categories of promising and doomed. The tests seem arbitrary and without real scientific value and yet have lasting consequences.

Segmentar la historia es realizar un ejercicio arbitrario; en rigor, es imposible precisar el origen exacto de un acontecimiento histórico, igual que es imposible precisar su exacto final: todo acontecimiento tiene su origen en un acontecimiento anterior, y éste en otro anterior, y éste en otro anterior, y así hasta el infinito, porque la historia es como la materia y en ella nada se crea ni se destruye: sólo se transforma.

If you really want something, it's nerve-racking, but at the same time, I try not to stress myself out about it too much because there are also so many arbitrary things that go into being cast for something - you know, like the color of your eyes, all these things that are kind of out of my control.

Ours was a pork-free household. The rules were arbitrary but strict: No pork in the house, ever. Except for the occasional pepperoni pizza. Or maybe Hawaiian.

If you don't believe there's some organising principle, or somebody up in the sky pulling the strings, then it can be very stressful. And nature itself is very arbitrary - it's not malevolent or benevolent; it doesn't even know we're here.

I wanted to dismantle the bollocks that there's a military structure to a gang, with a leader, second leader, the good looking one, first babe, second babe. It's far more arbitrary than that and their values shouldn't be romanticised. They aren't something you want to sign up to.

Any argument where one supposes an arbitrary choice to be made an uncountably infinite number of times ...[is] outside the domain of mathematics.

Now the Whigs also had to abide by the rule of law, the principle that laws should not be applied selectively or arbitrarily and that nobody is above the law.