Arbitrary Quotes - Page 9

• What causes adolescents to rebel is not the assertion of authority but the arbitrary use of power, with little explanation of therules and no involvement in decision-making. . . . Involving the adolescent in decisions doesn't mean that you are giving up your authority. It means acknowledging that the teenager is growing up and has the right to participate in decisions that affect his or her life.

  Laurence Steinberg

  Giving Up, Growing Up, Teenager

  7 Copy quote

• Lesbian and gay people are a permanent part of the American workforce, who currently have no protection from the arbitrary abuse of their rights on the job.

  Coretta Scott King

  Jobs, Gay, Rights

  7 Copy quote

• Defining and celebrating the New Father are by far the most popular ideas in our contemporary discourse on fatherhood. Father as close and nurturing, not distant and authoritarian. Fatherhood as more than bread winning. Fatherhood as new-and-improved masculinity. Fathers unafraid of feelings. Fathers without sexism. Fatherhood as fifty-fifty parenthood, undistorted by arbitrary gender divisions or stifling social roles.

  David Blankenhorn

  Father, Winning, Ideas

  7 Copy quote

• The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences. In our hands it develops and changes, through more or less arbitrary and deliberate revisions and additions of our own, more or less directly occasioned by the continuing stimulation of our sense organs. It is a pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention. But I have found no substantial reasons for concluding that there are any quite black threads in it, or any white ones.

  Willard Van Orman Quine

  Father, White, Hands

  Willard Van Orman Quine (1976). “The Ways of Paradox, and Other Essays”, p.132, Harvard University Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Virtue and vice suppose the freedom to choose between good and evil; but what can be the morals of a woman who is not even in possession of herself, who has nothing of her own, and who all her life has been trained to extricate herself from the arbitrary by ruse, from constraint by using her charms?... As long as she is subject to man's yoke or to prejudice, as long as she receives no professional education, as long as she is deprived of her civil rights, there can be no moral law for her!

  Flora Tristan

  Men, Rights, Law

  26 Copy quote

• Plain experience and common sense inform us that no abstract Person can have made us as we are without also wishing to delete us and start over (Gen. 8:21; Zeph. 1:2). Therefore, the existence of cruel and arbitrary nature, together with the universality of human sin, prevents us from beginning the theological enterprise with any concept of God that is distinct from revelation. All theologies of a cosmic harmonic principle shipwreck on the truths of tragedy, catastrophe, and injustice.

  Paul F. M. Zahl

  Common Sense, Starting Over, Together

  6 Copy quote

• I removed the freeway from its temporal context. Overpasses, cloverleafs, exit ramps took on the personality of Mayan ruins for me. Without destination, without cessation, my run was often silent and empty; there were no increments, no arbitrary graduations reducing time to functional units. I abstracted and purified.

  Tom Robbins

  Running, Personality, Ruins

  4 Copy quote

• Why are there beings at all instead of nothing? That is the question. Presumably it is not arbitrary question, "Why are there beings at all instead of nothing"- this is obviously the first of all questions. Of course it is not the first question in the chronological sense [...] And yet, we are each touched once, maybe even every now and then, by the concealed power of this question, without properly grasping what is happening to us. In great despair, for example, when all weight tends to dwindle away from things and the sense of things grows dark, the question looms.

  Martin Heidegger

  Dark, Despair, Example

  139 Copy quote

• Science, like nothing else among the institutions of mankind, grows like a weed every year. Art is subject to arbitrary fashion, religion is inwardly focused and driven only to sustain itself, law shuttles between freeing us and enslaving us.

  Kary Mullis

  Weed, Fashion, Art

  20 Copy quote

• The increasing tendency towards seeing people in terms of one dominant ‘identity’ (‘this is your duty as an American’, ‘you must commit these acts as a Muslim’, or ‘as a Chinese you should give priority to this national engagement’) is not only an imposition of an external and arbitrary priority, but also the denial of an important liberty of a person who can decide on their respective loyalties to different groups (to all of which he or she belongs).

  Amartya Sen

  Loyalty, Giving, People

  47 Copy quote

• Morality, then, is not a set of arbitrary regulations dictated by a vengeful deity and written down in a book; nor is it the custom of a particular culture or tribe. It is a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives and the opportunity the world provides for positive-sum games.

  Steven Pinker

  Book, Opportunity, Games

  Steven Pinker (2011). “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined”, p.211, Penguin

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• No story has a beginning, and no story has an end. Beginnings and endings may be conceived to serve a purpose, to serve a momentary and transient intent, but they are, in their fundamental nature, arbitrary and exist solely as a convenient construct in the minds of man. Lives are messy, and when we set out to relate them, or parts of them, we cannot ever discern precise and objective moments when any given event began. All beginnings are arbitrary.

  Caitlín R. Kiernan

  Men, Mind, Events

  5 Copy quote

• Luck doesn't shine her light on each of us equally. She is arbitrary, irrational, unfair and sometimes downright cruel.

  Francine Pascal

  Light, Shining, Luck

  Francine Pascal (2003). “Sam (#2) and Escape (#26)”, p.157, Simon and Schuster

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Love is a word. A sound. Its association with a particular feeling is arbitrary, unmeasurable, and ultimately meaningless

  Hugh Laurie

  Love Is, Feelings, Association

  42 Copy quote

• Our Press and our schools cultivate Chauvinism, militarism, dogmatism, conformism and ignorance. The arbitrary power of the Government is unlimited, and unexampled in history; freedom of the Press, of opinion and of movement are as thoroughly exterminated as though the proclamation of the Rights of Man had never been. We have built up the most gigantic police apparatus, with informers made a national institution, and the most refined scientific system of political and mental torture. We whip the groaning masses of the country towards a theoretical future happiness, which only we can.

  Arthur Koestler

  Country, School, Ignorance

  4 Copy quote

• He is annoyed with their lack of interest, their blithe ignorance of the arbitrary genetic lottery that has granted them their privileged lives.

  Khaled Hosseini

  Ignorance, Annoyed, Granted

  Khaled Hosseini (2013). “And the Mountains Echoed”, p.160, A&C Black

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• She didn’t understand a damned thing about life except that it was arbitrary and cruel, and some people got away with murder while others made one tiny, careless mistake and paid a terrible price.

  Liane Moriarty

  Mistake, People, Tiny

  4 Copy quote

• Only in truth does charity shine forth, only in truth can charity be authentically lived. Truth is the light that gives meaning and value to charity. That light is both the light of reason and the light of faith, through which the intellect attains to the natural and supernatural truth of charity: it grasps its meaning as gift, acceptance, and communion. Without truth, charity degenerates into sentimentality. Love becomes an empty shell, to be filled in an arbitrary way.

  Pope Benedict XVI

  Life, Acceptance, Love Is

  Pope Benedict XVI's Encyclical Letter Caritas in Veritate, w2.vatican.va. June 29, 2009.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Marriage is not a natural phenomenon. It is artificial, arbitrary. And when it disappears you cannot do anything to bring it back. You can pretend, but that pretension makes you a hypocrite. And your pretension cannot deceive the woman, because she has known your love and the pretension cannot become the substitute. The only way is to separate - in friendship, because you have given each other so much.

  Rajneesh

  Marriage, Hypocrite, Way

  9 Copy quote

• The aim of all struggles for liberty is to keep in bounds the armed defenders of peace, the governors and their constables. The political concept of the individual's freedom means: freedom from arbitrary action on the part of the police power.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Struggle, Mean, Political

  Ludwig Von Mises (1978). “Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, The”, p.90, Ludwig von Mises Institute

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• The connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary.

  Ferdinand de Saussure

  Connections

  76 Copy quote

• The question we must ask ourselves as a culture is whether we want to embrace the change that must come, or resist it. Are we so attached to the dietary fallacies with which we were raised, so afraid to counter the arbitrary laws of eating taught to us in childhood by our misinformed parents, that we cannot alter the course they set us on, even if it leads to our own ruin? Does the prospect of standing apart or encounttering ridicule scare us even from saving ourselves?

  Howard Lyman

  Law, Childhood, Parent

  "Mad Cowboy: Plain Truth from the Cattle Rancher Who Won't Eat Meat". Book by Howard Lyman and Glen Merzer, 1998.

  54 Copy quote

  Show source

• Mother Nature's ruthless to the weak, but isn't arbitrary cruel or negative. Mother Nature saves aggression for extreme situations, and instead uses consistent leadership--to help keep things running smoothly. Mother nature doesn't rule by fear and anger, but by calm strength and assertiveness.

  Cesar Millan

  Mother, Running, Negative

  49 Copy quote

• Her searches after knowledge were arbitrary and without context. It was as if she were shining a small flashlight of curiosity into the dark room of the world.

  Gloria Steinem

  Dark, Shining, Curiosity

  Gloria Steinem (2013). “Marilyn: Norma Jeane”, p.183, Open Road Media

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• There's something arbitrary about taking a picture. So I can stand at the edge of a highway and take one step forward and it can be a natural landscape untouched by man and I can take one step back and include a guardrail and change the meaning of the picture radically... I can take a picture of a person at one moment and make them look contemplative and photograph them two seconds later and make them look frivolous.

  Stephen Shore

  Photography, Art, Creativity

  16 Copy quote