Arbitrary Quotes

All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values. (Marshall McLuhan)
The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting. View quote
Henry James
The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired. View quote
Stephen Hawking
It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age. View quote
Margaret Mead
If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place. View quote
Margaret Mead
Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness. View quote
George Washington
Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people. View quote
John Adams
...Be just and if you can't be just, be arbitrary. View quote
William S. Burroughs
A state that denies its citizens their basic rights becomes a danger to its neighbors as well internal arbitrary rule will be reflected in arbitrary external relations. The suppression of public opinion, the abolition of public competition for power and its public exercise opens the way for the state power to arm itself in any way it sees fit. A state that does not hesitate to lie to its own people will not hesitate to lie to other states. View quote
Václav Havel
Standards of beauty are arbitrary. Body shame exists only to the extent that our physiques don't match our own beliefs about how we should look. View quote
Martha Beck
Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere; I would be different. (Frances Mayes)
Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles. View quote
George Jean Nathan
The desire for liberty has also made itself felt as struggle against domestic tyranny or arbitrary rule. View quote
Emily Greene Balch
Personally, I don't like the term 'success.' It's too arbitrary and too relative a thing. It's usually someone else's definition, not yours. View quote
Ichiro Suzuki
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. View quote
Charles Krauthammer
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. View quote
William Hazlitt
In times of political confusion, and under an arbitrary government, many will prefer to keep their capital inactive, concealed, and unproductive, either of profit or gratification, rather than run the risk of its display. This latter evil is never felt under a good government. View quote
Jean-Baptiste Say
Valuation is vague and arbitrary, when there is no assurance that it will be generally acquiesced in by others. View quote
Jean-Baptiste Say
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." View quote
Freeman Dyson
The necessity for power is obvious, because life cannot be lived without order; but the allocation of power is arbitrary because all men are alike, or very nearly. Yet power must not seem to be arbitrarily allocated, because it will not then be recognized as power. Therefore prestige, which is illusion, is of the very essence of power. View quote
Simone Weil
Gold and silver, like other commodities, have an intrinsic value, which is not arbitrary, but is dependent on their scarcity, the quantity of labour bestowed in procuring them, and the value of the capital employed in the mines which produce them. (David Ricardo)
I began in 1976, with small abstract paintings that allowed me to do what I had never let myself do: put something down at random. And then, of course, I realized that it never can be random. It was all a way of opening a door for me. If I don't know what's coming – that is, if I have no hard-and-fast image, as I have with a photographic original – then arbitrary choice and chance play an important part. View quote
Gerhard Richter
All of our punishment institutions, including jails, laws, church confessionals, and so forth, are systems of illusion. The order of the universe, the infinite justice of yin and yang, naturally takes care of all motion and compensation. We don't need to invent arbitrary ways to make balance with punishments. View quote
Michio Kushi
All the proliferating falsifications of what I and everyone I know experienced once in what it is now so convenient to call the "fifties" or "sixties," as if life was really measured or lived in arbitrary decades, when the history books are sold like comix. View quote
Lester Bangs
Arbitrary power is like most other things which are very hard, very liable to be broken. View quote
Abigail Adams