Arbitrary Quotes - Page 4

• All "public interest' legislation (and any distribution of money taken by force from some men for the unearned benefit of others) comes down ultimately to the grant of an undefined undefinable, non-objective, arbitrary power to some government officials. The worst aspect of it is not that such a power can be used dishonestly, but that it cannot be used honestly. The wisest man in the world, with the purest integrity, cannot find a criterion for the just, equitable, rational application of an unjust, inequitable, irrational principle.

  Ayn Rand

  Integrity, Taken, Men

  Ayn Rand, Nathaniel Branden, Alan Greenspan, Robert Hessen (1986). “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal”, p.161, Penguin

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• Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness - pushing us at intervals close to taboo and dangerous desires, which range from the impulse to commit sudden arbitrary violence upon another person to the voluptuous yearning for the extinction of one's consciousness, for death itself. Even on the level of simple physical sensation and mood, making love surely resembles having an epileptic fit at least as much as, if not more than, it does eating a meal or conversing with someone.

  Susan Sontag

  Love, Simple, Desire

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• The jury system has come to stand for all we mean by English justice. The scrutiny of 12 honest jurors provides defendants and plaintiffs alike a safeguard from arbitrary perversion of the law.

  Winston Churchill

  Mean, Law, Justice

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• A license cannot be revoked because a man is red-headed or because he was divorced, except for a calling, if such there be, for which red-headedness or an unbroken marriage may have some rational bearing. If a State licensing agency lays bare its arbitrary action, or if the State law explicitly allows it to act arbitrarily, that is precisely the kind of State action which the Due Process Clause forbids.

  Felix Frankfurter

  Men, Agency, Law

  "Barsky v. Board of Regents of the University, 347 U.S. 442". U.S. Supreme Court case, supreme.justia.com. April 26, 1954.

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• In the first place, it is obvious that not only is wealth concentrated in our times but an immense power and despotic economic dictatorship is consolidated in the hands of a few, who often are not owners but only the trustees and managing directors of invested funds which they administer according to their own arbitrary will and pleasure. This dictatorship is being most forcibly exercised by those who, since they hold the money and completely control it, control credit also and rule the lending of money.

  Pope Pius XI

  Hands, Credit, Politics

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• If it were possible adequately to present the whole of a culture, stressing every aspect exactly as appears in the culture itself, no single detail would appear bizarre or strange or arbitrary to the reader, but rather the details would all appear natural and reasonable as they do to the natives who have lived all their lives within the culture.

  Gregory Bateson

  Stress, Details, Culture

  "Naven: A Survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture". Book by Gregory Bateson, 1936.

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• In an essay 10 years ago, I pointed out that it is utterly logical for polygamy rights to follow gay rights. After all, if traditional marriage is defined as the union of (1) two people of (2) opposite gender, and if, as advocates of gay marriage insist, the gender requirement is nothing but prejudice, exclusion and an arbitrary denial of one's autonomous choices in love, then the first requirement - the number restriction (two and only two) - is a similarly arbitrary, discriminatory and indefensible denial of individual choice.

  Charles Krauthammer

  Gay, Individual Choice, Two

  "Pandora and Polygamy". jewishworldreview.com. March 17, 2006.

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• People don't mind positive stereotypes. People don't mind positive assumptions. It's only negative assumptions about them. So their outrage is so arbitrary.

  Jim Norton

  People, Mind, Negative

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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• We cannot by a little verbal sophistry confound the qualities of different minds, nor force opposite excellences into a union by all the intolerance in the world. If we have a taste for some one precise style or manner, we may keep it to ourselves and let others have theirs. If we are more catholic in our notions, and want variety of excellence and beauty, it is spread abroad for us to profusion in the variety of books and in the several growth of men's minds, fettered by no capricious or arbitrary rules.

  William Hazlitt

  Book, Men, Opposites

  "Table Talk: Essays On Men And Manners". Book by William Hazlitt. Chapter: "On Criticism", 1822.

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• We should try to achieve things for ourselves and not rely on former or past family glories with which we have no connection but the arbitrary nature of our birth.

  Shirley Franklin

  Past, Trying, Connections

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• What causes adolescents to rebel is not the assertion of authority but the arbitrary use of power, with little explanation of the rules and no involvement in the decision-making.

  Laurence Steinberg

  Father, Decision, Rebel

  Laurence Steinberg (2011). “You and Your Adolescent, New and Revised edition: The Essential Guide for Ages 10-25”, p.19, Simon and Schuster

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• Terrorists can endanger some of us, but the war on terror endangers us all. How much more can the Constitution be diminished before it is completely replaced by arbitrary government power?

  Paul Craig Roberts

  War, Government, Constitution

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• Me, what's that after all? An arbitrary limitation of being bounded by the people before and after and on either side. Where they leave off I begin, and vice versa.

  Russell Hoban

  Art, Philosophy, People

  Russell Hoban (2012). “The Turtle Diary”, p.37, A&C Black

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• The Truth is not Arbitrary or a Matter of Opinion, but can be Investigated, and Those who Earnestly Search for the Truth will Find It. The Truth is Hidden to the Blind, but he who has the Mental Eye Sees the Truth.

  Gautama Buddha

  Eye, Matter, Opinion

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• We are deeply concerned about the situation in Russia with regards to human rights. There are several examples of this situation, such as the new law requiring NGOs to register as "foreign agents", the law banning homosexual "propaganda", problems with the rule of law and arbitrary judicial processes, and court rulings against the opposition.

  Cecilia Malmstrom

  Law, Russia, Rights

  "Situation in Russia". Personal blog at the European Commission website, ec.europa.eu. January 17, 2014.

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• What outsiders discover in their adventures on the other side of the looking glass is the courage to repudiate self-contempt and recognise their “alienation” as a precious gift of freedom from arbitrary norms that they did not make and did not sanction. At the moment a person questions the validity of the rules, the victim is no longer a victim.

  Jamake Highwater

  Adventure, Glasses, Self

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• It is clear that there is no classification of the Universe that is not arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what kind of thing the universe is.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Knowledge, Simple, Kind

  "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins" by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Will Fitzgerald, 1952.

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• To the American people of 1789, their nation promised a new way of life: each individual a free man; each having the right to seek his own happiness; a republican form of government in which the people would be sovereign; and no arbitrary power over people's lives. Less than two hundred years later, almost every aspect of the dream has been lost.

  Charles A. Reich

  Dream, Men, Years

  charles a. reich (1970). “the greening of america”

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• The claim is also sometimes made that science is as arbitrary or irrational as all other claims to knowledge, or that reason itself is an illusion. As Ethan Allen said Those who invalidate reason ought seriously to consider whether they argue against reason with or without reason; if with reason, then they establish the principle that they are labouring to dethrone. If they argue without reason, which they must do, in order to be consistent with themselves, they are out of reach of rational conviction, nor do they deserve a rational argument.

  Carl Sagan

  Science, Order, Principles

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• In desperation I asked Fermi whether he was not impressed by the agreement between our calculated numbers and his measured numbers. He replied, "How many arbitrary parameters did you use for your calculations?" I thought for a moment about our cut-off procedures and said, "Four." He said, "I remember my friend Johnny von Neumann used to say, with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk." With that, the conversation was over.

  Freeman Dyson

  Cutting, Agreement, Elephants

  "A meeting with Enrico Fermi" by Freeman Dyson, www.nature.com. January 22, 2004.

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• Arbitrary rules teach kids discipline: If every rule made sense, they wouldn't be learning respect for authority, they'd be learning logic.

  Stephen Colbert

  Kids, Discipline, Logic

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• Inflation is the fiscal complement of statism and arbitrary government. It is a cog in the complex of policies and institutions which gradually lead toward totalitarianism .

  Ludwig von Mises

  Government, Cogs, Institutions

  Ludwig von Mises (2013). “The Theory of Money and Credit”, p.428, Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

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• There is some pressure when you are a woman doing what I do that you must support all other women unconditionally, no matter what they're projecting, or writing, or producing, or putting forth as their art. I think that's equally arbitrary and random and unfair, and kind of sexist. The secretly sexist way. I have really high standards for what I think is funny. I have that for everything, and I think it would be disingenuous of me to blanket-ly love everything a woman has produced simply to make a statement that we're all in this together.

  Mindy Kaling

  Art, Writing, Thinking

  Interview with Genevieve Koski, www.avclub.com. November 16, 2011.

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• It is the wicked deception of love that it begins by making us dwell not upon a woman in the outside world but upon a doll inside our head, the only woman who is always available in fact, the only one we shall ever possess, whom the arbitrary nature of memory, almost as absolute as that of the imagination, may have made as different from the real woman as the real Balbec had been from the Balbec I imagined- a dummy creation that little by little, to our own detriment, we shall force the real woman to resemble.

  Marcel Proust

  Memories, Real, Imagination

  Marcel Proust, Christopher Prendergast (2004). “The Guermantes Way”, Viking Press

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• Our work on light bulbs wasn't an arbitrary mandate. We didn't just pick a standard out of the air, or look for a catchy sounding standard like 25 by 2025 not based in science or feasibility. Instead, we worked with both industry and environmental groups to come up with a standard that made sense and was doable.

  Fred Upton

  Light, Air, Environmental

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