Arbitrary Quotes - Page 17

• It is convention and arbitrary rewards which make all the merit and demerit of what we call vice and virtue.

  Julien Offray de La Mettrie

  Vices, Rewards, Merit

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• Man knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless that the colors of an autumn forest....Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of them , in all their tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of his own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Memories, Believe, Autumn

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• A lot of my movies were completely destroyed by the censors, who can be pretty arbitrary. They're not completely fair with how they treat one person vs. another.

  Amy Heckerling

  Treats, Persons, Fairs

  Interview with Noel Murray, film.avclub.com. March 20, 2008.

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• The error which underlies the very existence of this debate is that there is some kind of perfect Platonic form of the computer language, which some real languages reflect more perfectly than others. Plato was brilliant for his time but reality is not expressable in terms of arbitrary visions of perfection, and furthermore, one programmer's ideal is often another's hell.

  Paul Vixie

  Plato, Real, Errors

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• Democracy is about non-arbitrary decisions. Democracy is about spreading decisions; it is not about destroying processes.

  Rahul Gandhi

  Decision, Democracy, Process

  Times Now Interview with Arnab Goswami, www.hindustantimes.com. January 28, 2014.

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• Chaos, the life force of the universe, is not human-hearted. Therefore the wizard cannot be human-hearted when he seeks to tap the force of the universe. He performs monstrous and arbitrary acts to loosen the hold of human limitations upon himself.

  Peter J. Carroll

  Wizards, Chaos, Force

  Peter J. Carroll (1987). “Liber Null & Psychonaut: An Introduction to Chaos Magic”, p.66, Weiser Books

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• Every phenomenon can be experienced in two ways. These two ways are not arbitrary, but are bound up with the phenomenon – developing out of its nature and characteristics : Externally – or – inwardly.

  Wassily Kandinsky

  Two, Way, Characteristics

  Wassily Kandinsky, Hilla Rebay (1947). “Point and Line to Plane”, p.17, Courier Corporation

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• Good design is thorough down to the last detail - Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the consumer.

  Dieter Rams

  Design Process, Care, Lasts

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• In Russia, whatever be the appearance of things, violence and arbitrary rule is at the bottom of them all. Tyranny rendered calm by the influence of terror is the only kind of happiness which this government is able to afford its people.

  Marquis de Custine

  Russia, Government, People

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• It is not the right of property which is protected, but the right to property. Property, per se, has no rights; but the individual - the man - has three great rights, equally sacred from arbitrary interference: the right to his life, the right to his liberty, the right to his property The three rights are so bound together as to be essentially one right. To give a man his life but to deny him his liberty, is to take from him all that makes his life worth living. To give him his liberty but take from him the property which is the fruit and badge of his liberty is to still leave him a slave.

  George Sutherland

  Men, Rights, Giving

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• Movies tie things up in an arbitrary length of time, but I have always liked things that aren't fully realised.

  Peter Weir

  Ties, Length, Realised

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• We can, if we so choose, wander aimlessly over the continent of the arbitrary. Rootless as some winged seed blown about on a serendipitous spring breeze.

  Haruki Murakami

  Spring, Breeze, Wander

  "A Wild Sheep Chase: A Novel". Book by Haruki Murakami, October 13, 1982.

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• ...By combining a popular hatred of the class of entrepreneurs with the blow already given to social security by the violent and arbitrary disturbance of contract,... governments are fast rendering impossible a continuance of the social and economic order of the nineteenth century.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Blow, Government, Order

  John Maynard Keynes (1929). “The Economic Consequences of the Peace: The classic text on the Treaty of Versailles and post war Europe”, p.140, Harriman House Limited

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• But the desire of obtaining the advantages, and of escaping the burthens, of political society, is a perpetual and inexhaustible source of discord; nor can it reasonably be presumed that the restoration of British freedom was exempt from tumult and faction. The pre-eminence of birth and fortune must have been frequently violated by bold and popular citizens; and the haughty nobles, who complained that they were become the subjects of their own servants, would sometimes regret the reign of an arbitrary monarch.

  Edward Gibbon

  Regret, Escaping, History

  Edward Gibbon (1840). “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, p.100

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• The distinctions of personal merit and influence, so conspicuous in a republic, so feeble and obscure under a monarchy, were abolished by the despotism of the emperors; who substituted in their room a severe subordination of rank and office, from the titled slaves who were seated on the steps of the throne, to the meanest instruments of arbitrary power.

  Edward Gibbon

  History, Office, Thrones

  Edward Gibbon (2009). “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Edited and Abridged): Abridged Edition”, p.325, Modern Library

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• Schinkel was not arbitrary in his use of historical modes but rather eclectic in the best sense of the word. He could search the past for its conspicuous successes using them both freely and discursively as the basis for a contemporary architecture.

  Karl Friedrich Schinkel

  Past, Historical, Use

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• We lay it down as a fundamental, that laws, to be just, must give a reciprocation of right; that, without this, they are mere arbitrary rules of conduct, founded in force, and not in conscience.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Law, Giving, Fundamentals

  Thomas Jefferson, Richard Holland Johnston, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association of the United States “The Writings of Thomas Jefferson”

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• True love should be, according to its origin, entirely arbitrary and entirely accidental at the same time; it should seem both necessary and free; in keeping with its nature, however, it should be both destiny and virtue and appear as a mystery and a miracle.

  Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

  Destiny, Miracle, Mystery

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• Knowledge is a continuous fabric, in which ideas are connected to other ideas. Reason-free zones, in which people can assert arbitrary beliefs safe from ordinary standards of evaluation, can only corrupt this fabric, just as a contradiction can corrupt a system of logic, allowing falsehoods to proliferate through it.

  Steven Pinker

  Ideas, People, Ordinary

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• Throughout history, fairly arbitrary lines drawn on maps have determined who prospers and who needs, who eats and who starves, who attacks and who is attacked, who lives long and who dies young. Oh, we have been slaves to those lines for so long.

  Gavin de Becker

  Long, Needs, Maps

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• The reflection and experience of many years have led me to consider the holy writings not only as the most authentic and instructive in themselves, but as the clue to all other history. They tell us what man is, and they alone tell us why he is what he is: a contradictory creature that seeing and approving of what is good, pursues and performs what is evil. All of private and public life is there displayed. ... From the same pure fountain of wisdom we learn that vice destroys freedom; that arbitrary power is founded on public immorality.

  Gouverneur Morris

  Writing, Reflection, Men

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• We must uncover our rituals for what they are: completely arbitrary things, tied to our bourgeois way of life; it isgood-and that is the real theater-totranscend them in the manner of play, bymeans of games and irony; it is good to be dirty and bearded, to have long hair,to look like a girl when one is a boy (and vice versa); one must put "inplay," show up, transform and reversethe systems which quietly order us about.

  Michel Foucault

  Girl, Real, Dirty

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• Poetry is a very complex art.... It is an art of pure sound bound in through an art of arbitrary and conventional symbols.

  Ezra Pound

  Art, Poetry, Sound

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• I sit at my desk
  each night with no place to go,
  opening the wrinkled maps of Milwaukee and Buffalo,
  the whole U.S.,
  its cemeteries, its arbitrary time zones,
  through routes like small veins, capitals like small stones.

  Anne Sexton

  Night, Time Zones, Veins

  Anne Sexton, Diane Wood Middlebrook, Diana Hume George (2000). “Selected Poems of Anne Sexton”, p.74, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The impulse to perfection cannot exist where the definition of perfection is the arbitrary decision of authority. That which is born in loneliness and from the heart cannot be defended against the judgment of a committee of sycophants. The volatile essences which make literature cannot survive the clichés of a long series of story conferences.

  Raymond Chandler

  Loneliness, Heart, Essence

  Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Gardiner, Kathrine Sorley Walker (1977). “Raymond Chandler Speaking”, p.120, Univ of California Press

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