Arbitrary Quotes - Page 14

• When you have trouble with things—whether it's figuring out whether to push or pull a door or the arbitrary vagaries of the modern computer and electronics industries—it's not your fault. Don't blame yourself: blame the designer.

  Donald A. Norman

  Doors, Electronics, Faults

  "The Design of Everyday Things". Book by Donald Norman, Introduction to the 2002 Edition, p. x, 2002.

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• Chaos, the life force of the universe, is not human-hearted. Therefore the wizard cannot be human-hearted when he seeks to tap the force of the universe. He performs monstrous and arbitrary acts to loosen the hold of human limitations upon himself.

  Peter J. Carroll

  Wizards, Chaos, Force

  Peter J. Carroll (1987). “Liber Null & Psychonaut: An Introduction to Chaos Magic”, p.66, Weiser Books

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• Poetry is a very complex art.... It is an art of pure sound bound in through an art of arbitrary and conventional symbols.

  Ezra Pound

  Art, Poetry, Sound

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• In Russia, whatever be the appearance of things, violence and arbitrary rule is at the bottom of them all. Tyranny rendered calm by the influence of terror is the only kind of happiness which this government is able to afford its people.

  Marquis de Custine

  Russia, Government, People

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• ..where effective competition can be created, it is a better way of guiding individual efforts than any other... regards competition as superior not only because it is in most circumstances the most efficient method known but even more because it is the only method by which our activities can be adjusted to each other without coercive or arbitrary intervention of authority.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Individual Effort, Competition, Way

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• The first step is to measure whatever can easily be measured. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can't be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide.

  Charles Handy

  Suicide, Giving, Risk

  Charles Handy (2011). “The Empty Raincoat: Making Sense of the Future”, p.219, Random House

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• Eternal vigilance must be maintained to guard against those who seek to stifle ideas, establish a narrow orthodoxy, and divide our nation along arbitrary lines of race, ethnicity, and religious belief or non-belief.

  Jesse Ventura

  Religious, Ethnicity, Ideas

  Jesse Ventura (2008). “Don't Start the Revolution Without Me!: From the Minnesota Governor's Mansion to the Baja Outback : Reflections and Revisionings”, Skyhorse Publishing Company Incorporated

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• Everybody who says the same words is the same person if the spectra are the same only they happen differently in time, you dig? But the time is arbitrary. You pick your zero point anywhere you want, that way you can shuffle each person's time line sideways till they all coincide.

  Thomas Pynchon

  Zero, Lines, Want

  Thomas Pynchon (2012). “The Crying of Lot 49”, p.67, Penguin

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• I have seen the rise of fascism and communism. Both philosophies glorify the arbitrary power of the state... But both theories fail. Both deny those God-given liberties that are the inalienable right of each person on this planet, indeed, they deny the existence of God.

  Ronald Reagan

  Philosophy, Liberty, Failing

  United States. President (1981-1989 : Reagan), Ronald Reagan (1982). “Ronald Reagan”

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• Independent of its connection with human destiny hereafter, the fate of republican government is indissolubly bound up with the fate of the Christian religion, and a people who reject its holy faith will find themselves the slaves of their own evil passions and of arbitrary power.

  Lewis Cass

  Christian, Passion, Independent

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• Carbon dioxide is natural, it is not harmful, it is a part of Earth's lifecycle. And yet we're being told that we have to reduce this natural substance, reduce the American standard of living, to create an arbitrary reduction in something that is naturally occurring in Earth.

  Michele Bachmann

  Environmental, Substance, Earth

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• Einstein repeatedly argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.

  Fred Brooks

  Comfort, Amusing, Programming

  "No Silver Bullet". Book by Fred Brooks, 1986.

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• Trials are not arbitrary. When I speak about them, I am referring to the mindful suffering.Man has come to his present development thanks to his hardships and trials.These are what prepare man for the Coming of Love.

  Peter Deunov

  Pain, Grief, Men

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• Good design is thorough down to the last detail - Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the consumer.

  Dieter Rams

  Design Process, Care, Lasts

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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

  Rights, Water, Moral

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• No man can delegate,... any right of arbitrary dominion over a 3rd person; for that would imply a right in the 1st person, not only to make the 3rd person his slave, but also a right to dispose of him as a slave to still other persons. Any contract to do this is necessarily a criminal one...To call such a contract a “constitution” does not at all lessen its criminality, or add to its validity.

  Lysander Spooner

  Men, Criminals, Doe

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• We come now to the question: what is a priori certain or necessary, respectively in geometry (doctrine of space) or its foundations? Formerly we thought everything; nowadays we think nothing. Already the distance-concept is logically arbitrary; there need be no things that correspond to it, even approximately.

  Albert Einstein

  Distance, Math, Thinking

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• Arbitrary power has seldom... been introduced in any country at once. It must be introduced by slow degrees, and as it were step by step.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Country, Power, Degrees

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• The impulses of my heart are the voice of Nature, which is never mistaken. The institutions that stand in my way are man-made and are only arbitrary conventions to which I have never given my consent. In trampling these institutions underfoot, I shall have the double pleasure of satisfying my inclinations and of believing myself a hero

  Frederic Bastiat

  Believe, Hero, Heart

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• Every phenomenon can be experienced in two ways. These two ways are not arbitrary, but are bound up with the phenomenon – developing out of its nature and characteristics : Externally – or – inwardly.

  Wassily Kandinsky

  Two, Way, Characteristics

  Wassily Kandinsky, Hilla Rebay (1947). “Point and Line to Plane”, p.17, Courier Corporation

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• Democracy is about non-arbitrary decisions. Democracy is about spreading decisions; it is not about destroying processes.

  Rahul Gandhi

  Decision, Democracy, Process

  Times Now Interview with Arnab Goswami, www.hindustantimes.com. January 28, 2014.

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• The error which underlies the very existence of this debate is that there is some kind of perfect Platonic form of the computer language, which some real languages reflect more perfectly than others. Plato was brilliant for his time but reality is not expressable in terms of arbitrary visions of perfection, and furthermore, one programmer's ideal is often another's hell.

  Paul Vixie

  Plato, Real, Errors

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• A lot of my movies were completely destroyed by the censors, who can be pretty arbitrary. They're not completely fair with how they treat one person vs. another.

  Amy Heckerling

  Treats, Persons, Fairs

  Interview with Noel Murray, film.avclub.com. March 20, 2008.

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• Man knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless that the colors of an autumn forest....Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of them , in all their tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of his own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Memories, Believe, Autumn

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• It is convention and arbitrary rewards which make all the merit and demerit of what we call vice and virtue.

  Julien Offray de La Mettrie

  Vices, Rewards, Merit

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