Arbitrary Quotes - Page 6

• Grammar is not a set of arbitrary rules; it is a compact between people who wish to understand each other.

  Robert Breault

  People, Wish, Grammar

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• I wanted to dismantle the bollocks that there's a military structure to a gang, with a leader, second leader, the good looking one, first babe, second babe. It's far more arbitrary than that and their values shouldn't be romanticised. They aren't something you want to sign up to.

  Peter Mullan

  Military, Leader, Want

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• [C]ensorship in any form is the opening wedge for fascism, since it places arbitrary and unwarranted power in the hands of individuals.

  Jack Parsons

  Freedom, Power, Hands

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• Like other discriminatory legislation in our country's history, immigration laws define and differentiate legal status on the basis of arbitrary attributes. Immigration laws create unequal rights. People who break immigration laws don't cause harm or even potential harm (unlike, for example, drunk driving, which creates the potential for harm even if no accident occurs). Rather, people who break immigration laws do things that are perfectly legal for others, but denied to them--like crossing a border or, even more commonly, simply exist.

  Aviva Chomsky

  Country, Rights, Law

  Aviva Chomsky (2007). “They Take Our Jobs!: And 20 Other Myths about Immigration”, p.184, Beacon Press

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• I am a mortal enemy to arbitrary government and unlimited power.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Government, Enemy, Politics

  Benjamin Franklin (2007). “The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin: 1706-1757”, p.80, Regnery Publishing

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• There are just too many opportunities - and an increasing number of them - to hide systemic, institutional wrongdoing behind legal veils, legal theories, and arbitrary exemptions. I hope that we can start to chip away at this, but it sure looks like society is still sliding in the opposite direction.

  Chelsea Manning

  Opportunity, Opposites, Numbers

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• The oppression of it, the sense of helplessness, and really being part of a system and a bureaucracy that is arbitrary. I never thought of the depth of losing your freedom and what that meant. And I was surprised and delighted by ways people maintain their humanity and try to survive.

  Jenji Kohan

  People, Humanity, Trying

  Source: collider.com

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• Current government regulation interferes with honest voluntary exchanges by imposing arbitrary terms and requiring tons of paperwork disclosing information no one wants anyway.

  John Stossel

  Government, Want, Regulation

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• The freedom of individuals from compulsion or coercion never was, and is not now, the normal state of human affairs. The normal state for the ordinary person is tyranny, arbitrary control and abuse mainly by their own government.

  Walter E. Williams

  Government, Abuse, Normal

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• Insecurity must follow the transfer of responsibility from self to others, particularly when transferred to arbitrary and capricious government. Genuine security is a matter of self-responsibility, based on the right to the fruits of one's own labor and freedom to trade.

  Leonard Read

  Responsibility, Government, Self

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• America's belated embrace of government health care is going to be far more expensive and disastrous than the Euro-Canadian models. Whatever one's philosophical objection to the Canadian health system, it is, broadly, fair: Unless you're a cabinet minister or a big time hockey player, you'll enjoy the same equality of crappiness and universal lack of access that everybody else does. But, even before it's up-and-running, Pelosi-Reid-Obamacare is an impenetrable thicket of contradictory boondoggles, shameless payoffs and arbitrary shakedowns.

  Mark Steyn

  Running, Philosophical, Hockey

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• Fascism is [...] arbitrary rule by a charismatic head of state.

  Tibor R. Machan

  States, Fascism, Head Of State

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• As we deepen in understanding, the arbitrary divisions between inner and outer disappear. The essence of life, the beauty and grandeur of life, is its wholeness.

  Vimala Thakar

  Essence, Understanding, Division

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• The seams, the laminae between the various worlds the past present and future as well as the living and the nonliving may not be as distinct and clear-cut as we have been taught or as our somewhat arbitrary clocks and calendars have led us to believe.

  Rick Bass

  Believe, Cutting, Past

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• The law is an artificial human construct, quite arbitrary, and of absolutely no use anywhere else but in a court of law!

  John Quincy Adams

  Law, Use, Court

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• The redemptive power of divine grace no longer seemed credible, nor very respectable in the arbitrary performance that was claimed for it.

  Rebecca West

  Grace, Divine, Respectable

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• The procedure we are pursuing is that of true democracy. Semi-democracy accepts the dictatorship of a majority in establishing its arbitrary, ergo, unnatural, laws. True democracy discovers by patient experiment and unanimous acknowledgement what the laws of nature or universe may be for the physical support and metaphysical satisfaction of the human intellect's function in universe.

  R. Buckminster Fuller

  Law, Support, Democracy

  R. Buckminster Fuller (2008). “Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth”, p.103, Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller

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• There's a rule for what makes good fantasy work, and it's as strange as any riddle ever posed in a fairy tale: In fantasy, you can do anything; and therefore, the one thing you must not do is 'just anything.' Why? Because in a story where anything can happen and anything can be true, nothing matters. You have no reason to care what happens. It's all arbitrary, and arbitrary isn't interesting.

  Teresa Nielsen Hayden

  Interesting, Stories, Care

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• Even government by the consent of the governed, as in our own Constitution, must be limited in its power to act against its people; so that there may be no interference with the right to worship, or with the security of the home; no arbitrary imposition of pains or penalties by officials high or low; no restrictions on the freedom of men to seek education or work or opportunity of any kind, so that each man may become all he is capable of becoming.

  Robert Kennedy

  Pain, Home, Opportunity

  Robert F. Kennedy, Edwin O. Guthman (1993). “RFK: collected speeches”, Viking Pr

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• Any argument where one supposes an arbitrary choice to be made an uncountably infinite number of times ...[is] outside the domain of mathematics.

  Emile Borel

  Numbers, Choices, Argument

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• Every physicist knows that things connect with each other. To isolate things is not the way the universe works - winning best actor is arbitrary.

  Alan Arkin

  Winning, Actors, Way

  "OSCARS Q&A: Alan Arkin". Interview with Pete Hammond, deadline.com. February 9, 2013.

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• The pleasure a man gets from a landscape would [not] last long if he were convinced a priori that the forms and colors he sees are just forms and colors, that all structures in which they play a role are purely subjective and have no relation whatsoever to any meaningful order or totality, that they simply and necessarily express nothing....No walk through the landscape is necessary any longer; and thus the very concept of landscape as experienced by a pedestrian becomes meaningless and arbitrary. Landscape deteriorates altogether into landscaping.

  Max Horkheimer

  Meaningful, Men, Order

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• Heydrich, Eichmann, and company therefore invoke the usual trick of argument for breaking a true continuum that lacks a compelling point for separation: choose an arbitrary dividing line and then treat it as a self-evident law of nature.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Law, Self, Lines

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• We know that sensory phenomena are transcribed in the photographic emulsion in such a way that even if there is a causal link with the real phenomena, the graphic images can be considered as wholly arbitrary with respect to these phenomena.

  Umberto Eco

  Real, Links, Way

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• You know those award shows. The cliche is that it's an honor just to be nominated, but that happens to be true. Whoever wins it in the end, I don't know, sometimes it feels arbitrary. Sometimes it feels like it's deserving.

  Hank Azaria

  Winning, Awards, Honor

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