Quotes About Arbitrariness

However much I have frequented the mystics, deep down I have always sided with the Devil; unable to equal him in power, I have tried to be worthy of him, at least, in insolence, acrimony, arbitrariness, and caprice.

To invest social conventions with sanctity is to hide their arbitrariness in a cloak of seeming necessity.

raised in a family that was spared the major convulsions of history and that, having never experienced absolute arbitrariness, thought that if people were arrested, well then, there had to be a reason.

Freedom as a possession is a doubtful thing for a church; freedom must be won under the compulsion of a necessity. Freedom for the church comes from the necessity of the Word of God. Otherwise it becomes arbitrariness and ends in a great many new ties. Whether

The Americans speak so much about freedom in their sermons. Freedom as a possession is a doubtful thing for a church; freedom must be won under the compulsion of a necessity. Freedom for the church comes from the necessity of the Word of God. Otherwise it becomes arbitrariness and ends in a great many new ties.

The psychedelics are a powerful educational tool. They are the surest way to learn the arbitrariness of our ordinary perception. Many of us have had to use them to find out how little we knew.

You don't understand their mentality. They won't accept your resignation because they don't think you have the right to quit. They are the ones who decide how long you should stay and when you should be dispensed with. More than anything else, it was this arbitrariness that had become unbearable.

articulated by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, is "the arbitrariness of the sign," the wholly conventional pairing of a sound with a meaning. The word dog does not look like a dog, walk like a dog, or woof like a dog, but it means "dog" just the same. It does so because every English speaker has undergone an identical act of rote learning in childhood that links the sound to the meaning.

However much I have frequented the mystics, deep down I have always sided with the Devil; unable to equal him in power, I have tried to be worthy of him, at least, in insolence, acrimony, arbitrariness and caprice.

We are not concerned here with the ultimate consequence of rule by terror—namely, that nobody, not even the executors, can ever be free of fear; in our context we are dealing merely with the arbitrariness by which victims are chosen, and for this it is decisive that they are objectively innocent, that they are chosen regardless of what they may or may not have done.

Liberty isn't liberalism, arbitrariness, but it's connected; it's conditioned by the great values of love and solidarity and in general by the good.

She de-realizes her behavior by this sense of tentativeness, reversibility, contingency, arbitrariness of everything she does—and since situations only become real to her after a long time (perhaps never fully so) she has the space—of incomplete commitment, so to speak—to behave destructively, unreliably, erratically, self-indulgently, irresponsibly.

Que quede bien claro: el alma, como le dicen, es, pareciera, no cristalina sino pantanosa. Los motivos que la inducen, en esta cuadra, a dejarse llevar, como los llaman, al juego y a la exaltación, en la siguiente, con la misma arbitrariedad, y en forma no menos imprevisible, la sumen, para usar una vez más la expresión, en una intensa melancolía. En todo caso pareciera, ¿no?

The arbitrariness of the revolutionaries is terrible not because they're villains, but because it's a mechanism out of control, like a machine that's gone off the rails.

Better to choose a limit capriciously than to have none.

Often I am struck in amazement about a word: I suddenly realize that the complete arbitrariness of our language is but a part of the arbitrariness of our own world in general.

It is in their very irrationality, their arbitrariness, that they are refined," d'Avaux corrected her. "If the customs of the nobility made sense, anyone could figure them out, and become noble. But because they are incoherent and meaningless, not to mention ever-changing, the only way to know them is to be inculcated with them, to absorb them through the skin. This makes them a coin that is almost impossible to counterfeit.

Without always knowing what we were doing we were constantly adjusting to the arbitrariness by which we were surrounded.

The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in fairy books, charm, spell, enchantment. They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery.

Within the most disorderly reams of data lived an unexpected kind of order. Given the arbitrariness of the numbers he was examining, why, Mandelbrot asked himself, should any law hold at all? And why should it apply equally well to personal incomes and cotton prices?

I suspect that one of capitalism's crucial assets derives from the fact that the imagination of economists, including its critics, lags well behind its own inventiveness, the arbitrariness of its undertaking and the ruthlessness of the way in which it proceeds.

Freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.

Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness.

In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.