Quotes About Arbitrary

The images selected by memory are as arbitrary, as narrow, as elusive as those which the imagination had formed and reality has destroyed. There is no reason why, existing outside ourselves, a real place should conform to the pictures in our memory rather than those in our dreams. And besides, a fresh reality will perhaps make us forget, detest even, the desires on account of which we set out on our journey.

Proving one's freedom will often mean insisting on the most arbitrary, odd, unrepeatable aspects of one's behavior.

map is similar to a list comprehension but is more limited because it requires a function instead of an arbitrary expression.

that's why we need recursion here: the number of nested loops is arbitrary, and depends on the length of the sequence permuted:

It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age.

Standards of beauty are arbitrary. Body shame exists only to the extent that our physiques don't match our own beliefs about how we should look.

She had gotten an old cassette of the music that day from the school library, which still carried a small and arbitrary assortment located in a drawer in the back marked CASSETTES—which at this point in time might have been marked SCRIMSHAW.

Science is not a game in which arbitrary rules are used to decide what explanations are to be permitted.

Strength we think to be a virtue in government, but we do not find our defense against disintegration either in arbitrary or in very great power. Indeed, we are inclined to see in both these the symptoms of an already advanced decay

random outcomes of contingent fate in an arbitrary and uncaring universe.

The very term 'public utility' … is an absurd one. Every good is useful 'to the public,' and almost every good … may be considered 'necessary.' Any designation of a few industries as 'public utilities' is completely arbitrary and unjustified.

Though citizens are safe from the government in their homes, the homes themselves are not." By essentially abolishing the public use clause, the Court has subordinated individual rights to the arbitrary will of the government, Thomas remonstrated. "I do not believe that this Court can eliminate liberties expressly enumerated in the Constitution.

There is no truth. Life is just a series of coincidences, accidents and random urges which we carefully forge – for our own, sick reasons – into a convenient design. Everything is arbitrary. Only art exists to make the arbitrary congeal. Not memory or God or love, even. Only art. The truth is simply an idea, a structure which we employ – in very small doses – to render life bearable. It's just a convenient mechanism.

Neither a declaration of human rights, nor the proclamation of a constitution, nor an appeal to natural law, protects against the arbitrary power of the state. The only barrier to despotism is customary law.

As long as the government can arbitrarily decide which substances are legal and which are illegal, then those who remain behind bars for illegal substances are political prisoners

The calendar was a mathematical progression with arbitrary surprises.

La jeunesse est un temps pendant lequel les conventions sont et doivent être mal comprises : ou aveuglément combattues, ou aveuglément obéies. On ne peut pas concevoir, dans les commencements de la vie réfléchie, que seules les décisions arbitraires permettent à l'homme de fonder quoi que ce soit : langage, sociétés, connaissances, œuvres d'art.