Arbitrary Quotes - Page 14

• It is possible to see slavery and serfdom merely as extreme early forms of autocratic management, in which employees had no voice whatsoever in the work process and were viewed not as human beings but as alienated forms of individual wealth. Slavery, in this sense, did not die; it continues in modern dress in contemporary organizations wherever managers exercise autocratic power, unequal status, or arbitrary privileges, no matter how scientific the terminology or postmodern the image

  Kenneth Cloke

  Exercise, Organization, Voice

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• Maybe being an adult wasn't crossing some arbitrary age line into wisdom. Maybe it was like anything else - training wheels and mistakes, trial and error, and now and again that feeling that you might have wings.

  Megan Crane

  Mistake, Wings, Errors

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• There is a God inside my PC. An Old-Testament God with lots of arbitrary rules and utterly no mercy.

  Joseph Campbell

  Mercy, Old Testament, Testament

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• We shall never want to serve God in our real and secret hearts if He looms in our subconscious mind as an arbitrary Dictator or a Spoil-sport, or as one who takes advantage of His position to make us poor mortals feel guilty and afraid. We have not only to be impressed by the "size" and unlimited power of God, we have to be moved to genuine admiration, respect, and affection, if we are ever to worship Him.

  John Bertram Phillips

  Sports, Real, Heart

  John Bertram Phillips (1964). “Your God is too small”, Scribner Paper Fiction

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• The Constitution was framed fundamentally as a bulwark against governmental power, and preventing the arbitrary administration of punishment is a basic ideal of any society that purports to be governed by the rule of law.

  William J. Brennan

  Law, Punishment, Administration

  "McCleskey v. Kemp, 481 U.S. 279". Dissenting opinion, 1987.

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• The arbitrary division between church and state... is used, as an easily identifiable rallying point, to subdue the opinions of that vast body of citizens who represent those with religious convictions.

  Francis Schaeffer

  Christian, Religious, Rallying Point

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• Everything in life is arbitrary yet must be over-determined in literature. Jean McGarry knows how to tell a persuasive tale illuminating these truths.

  Harold Bloom

  Literature, Determined, Life Is

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• It is not an arbitrary "decree of God," but in the nature of man, that a veil shuts down on the facts of to-morrow; for the soul will not have us read any other cipher than that of cause and effect. By this veil, which curtains events, it instructs the children of men to live in to-day.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Children, Men, Soul

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2010). “Self-Reliance, the Over-Soul, and Other Essays”, p.63, Coyote Canyon Press

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• Being kind doesn't mean being soft or a wuss. Kindness is not a sign of weakness. It is a sign of confidence. If you have developed a reputation for kindness and consideration, then even the most unpleasant decisions will go down easier because everyone will understand why you are doing what you are doing. They will realize that your decision must be necessary, and is not arbitrary or without empathy. As the old saying puts it, 'To the world, you may be one person, but to one person you may be the world.'

  Colin Powell

  Kindness, Mean, Empathy

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• Arbitrary government power is being multiplied daily by the now practically unchallenged assumption that wherever there is any problem of any kind to be solved, government is the agency to step in and solve it.

  Henry Hazlitt

  Agency, Government, Steps

  Henry Hazlitt (1971). “Man Vs. the Welfare State”, p.183, Ludwig von Mises Institute

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• Humankind, which discovers its capacity to transform and in a certain sense create the world through its own work, forgets that this is always based on God's prior and original gift of things that are. People think that they can make arbitrary use of the earth, subjecting it without restraint to their wills, as though the earth did not have its own requisites and a prior God-given purpose, which human beings can indeed develop but must not betray.

  Pope John Paul II

  Thinking, People, Purpose

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• Artists, whatever their medium, make selections from the abounding materials of life, and organize these selections into works that are under the control of the artist.... In relation to the inclusiveness and literally endless intricacy of life, art is arbitrary, symbolic and abstracted. That is its value and the source of its own kind of order and coherence.

  Jane Jacobs

  Life, Art, Order

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• We might even invent laws for series or formula in an arbitrary manner, and set the engine to work upon them, and thus deduce numerical results which we might not otherwise have thought of obtaining; but this would hardly perhaps in any instance be productive of any great practical utility, or calculated to rank higher than as a philosophical amusement.

  Ada Lovelace

  Philosophical, Law, Amusement

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• The director's in charge of every single decision [in film]. It's a dictatorship.It's a benevolent dictatorship, but it's true. It's every single shot. There's nothing arbitrary.

  Matt Damon

  Decision, Directors, Film

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Whenever legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience.

  John Locke

  Freedom, War, People

  John Locke (1947). “Two Treatises of Government: With a Supplement, Patriarcha, by Robert Filmer”, p.233, Simon and Schuster

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• I'm interested in finding new and more humane modes of safety, and in exposing the arbitrary and superficial protections that have failed us.

  Laura Mullen

  Safety, Protection, Superficial

  Source: therumpus.net

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• You realize that these accidental decisions you make about changing jobs, about moving into an apartment where you make new friends and confidants, about going to one city over another, that sometimes they're completely arbitrary decisions that you haven't put as much thought into as perhaps you should have, and yet they change the course of your whole life.

  Anna Quindlen

  Jobs, Moving, Decisions You Make

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• I love that Voltaire was so willing to shock his readers with arbitrary cruelty. And I can completely relate to it.

  George Meyer

  Shock, Cruelty, Reader

  Source: www.ericspitznagel.com

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• I felt like I was cheating myself of those communities and cheating the audience because I wasn't able to know them. That's what the bikes did, without me having to put any arbitrary philosophy on what it was supposed to be. It enabled human connection.

  Ben Sollee

  Cheating, Philosophy, Community

  "Ben Sollee Interview | Activism by cello? On a bike?". Interview with Amanda Taylor, www.marandapleasantmedia.com.

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• I have to trick myself into writing a story - impose some arbitrary constraint to distract me from the constraints of my past habits or my fear that I don't have much to say.

  Catherine Brady

  Writing, Past, Stories

  Source: therumpus.net

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• If I wrote about "being [abstraction]" I would be ignoring existential issues (such as death, limited-time, the arbitrary nature of the universe, the mystery of consciousness) that I feel affect me most in my life and think about most of the time. Another reason is that it doesn't seem specific or accurate, to me, to write about "being [abstraction]." I think there are some other reasons.

  Tao Lin

  Writing, Thinking, Issues

  Source: brightestyoungthings.com

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• Freedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society and made by the legislative power vested in it and not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, arbitrary will of another man.

  John Locke

  Men, Rules To Live By, Liberty

  1681 Second Treatise on Civil Government (published anonymously1690).

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• The truth is an arbitrary, shifting, culturally relative, and historically molded phenomenon.

  Ken Wilber

  Shifting, Truth Is, Phenomenon

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• Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it.

  Ayn Rand

  Gun, Men, Political

  Ayn Rand (2011). “Ayn Rand Novel Collection”, p.1448, Penguin

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• If religions are diseases of the human psyche, as the philosopher Grintholde asserts, then religious wars must be reckoned the resultant sores and cankers infecting the aggregate corpus of the human race. Of all wars, these are the most detestable, since they are waged for no tangible gain, but only to impose a set of arbitrary credos upon another's mind.

  Jack Vance

  Religious, War, Race

  "The Face". Book by Jack Vance, 1979.

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