Arbitrary Quotes
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Suffering by nature or chance never seems so painful as suffering inflicted on us by the arbitrary will of another.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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According to scholars of linguistics, the relation between a word and its meaning is arbitrary.
Roy Blount, Jr.
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Be just and if you can't be just, be arbitrary.
William S. Burroughs
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Real life this fdar had taught me that in the adult world, fate was chaotic and uncertain. Guidelines for success were arbitrary. But in the world of D&D, at least there was a rule book... By role-playing, we were in control, and our characters... wandered through places of danger, their destinies, ostensibly, within our grasp.
Ethan Gilsdorf
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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
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Pity on the person who has become accustomed to seeing in necessity something arbitrary, who ascribes to the arbitrary some sort of reason, and even claims that following that sort of reason has religious value.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Once you buy the argument that some segment of the citizenry should lose their rights, just because they are envied or resented, you are putting your own rights in jeopardy - quite aside from undermining any moral basis for respecting anybody's rights. You are opening the floodgates to arbitrary power. And once you open the floodgates, you can't tell the water where to go.
Thomas Sowell
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I have lived with my husband more than I have with my parents... I live beside him, and know his worries, his hopes, and his dreams for his nation. We believe that things happen by design, not in an arbitrary way. And we believe it is our duty to make things happen.
Moza bint Nasser
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Panentheistic doctrine contains all of deism and pandeism except their arbitrary negations.
Charles Hartshorne
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Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness.
George Washington
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Arbitrary power is the natural object of temptation to a prince, as wine and women to a young fellow, or a bribe to a judge, or avarice to old age.
Jonathan Swift
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The calendar was a mathematical progression with arbitrary surprises.
Paul Scott
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The truest and greatest Poetry, (while subtly and necessarily always rhythmic, and distinguishable easily enough) can never again, in the English language, be express'd in arbitrary and rhyming metre, any more than the greatest eloquence, or the truest power and passion.
Walt Whitman
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The laws that forbid the carrying of arms...disarm only those who are
neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. Can it be supposed that
those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity...will
respect the less important and arbitrary ones... Such laws make things worse
for the assaulted and better for the assailants, they serve rather to
encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with
greater confidence than an armed man.
Cesare Beccaria
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Indeed, there is nothing more arbitrary than intervening as a stranger in a destiny which is not ours.
Simone de Beauvoir
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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
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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
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It is true, that a Law of Contract based on causae will always be an arbitrary and inelastic law; but it is a kind of law with which some great nations are satisfied at the present day.
Edward Jenks
