Arbitrary Quotes - Page 7

• It is irresponsible to set an arbitrary cap on how much therapy a Medicare beneficiary can receive. It ignores the health needs of our senior population - especially the oldest and sickest.

  John Ensign

  Senior, Population, Needs

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• The atmosphere of fear and security manipulated by the government has converted American citizens into terrorist suspects who are all subject to arbitrary and unreviewable detention and surveillance.

  Richard A. Falk

  Government, Atmosphere, Citizens

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• 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

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• The student of mathematics must get rid of all arbitrary thinking and follow purely the demands of thought. In thinking in this way, the laws of the spiritual world flow into him. This regulated thinking leads to the most spiritual truths.

  Rudolf Steiner

  Spiritual, Math, Thinking

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• A theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements: it must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations.

  Stephen Hawking

  Class, Two, Elements

  "A Brief History Of Time: From Big Bang To Black Holes". Book by Stephen Hawking, 1988.

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• If the truth is boring, civilization is irksome. The constraints inherent in civilized living are frustrating in innumerable ways. Yet those with the vision of the anointed often see these constraints as only arbitrary impositions, things from which they-and we all-can be 'liberated.' The social disintegration which has followed in the wake of such liberation has seldom provoked any serious reconsideration of the whole set of assumptions-the vision-which led to such disasters. That vision is too well insulated from feedback.

  Thomas Sowell

  Civilization, Vision, Way

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• Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Government, Sight, Important

  John Maynard Keynes (2011). “Essays in Persuasion”, p.77, W. W. Norton & Company

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• 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

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• The resurrection is not an isolated supernatural oddity proving how powerful, if apparently arbitrary, God can be when he wants to. Nor is it at all a way of showing that there is indeed a heaven awaiting us after death. It is the decisive event demonstrating that God’s kingdom really has been launched on earth as it is in heaven.

  N. T. Wright

  Powerful, Oddities, Heaven

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• The militia is the natural defense of a free country against sudden foreign invasions, domestic insurrections, and domestic usurpation of power by rulers. The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of the republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally ... enable the people to resist and triumph over them.

  Joseph Story

  Country, Strong, People

  Joseph Story (1833). “Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States: With a Preliminary Review of the Constitutional History of the Colonies and States, Before the Adoption of the Constitution”, p.746

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• Finally it should be the earnest wish and paramount aim of the military administration to win the confidence, respect, and affection of the inhabitants of the Philippines by assuring them in every possible way that full measure of individual rights and liberties which is the heritage of free peoples, and by proving to them that the mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation substituting the mild sway of justice and right for arbitrary rule.

  William McKinley

  Military, Winning, Rights

  McKinley's Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation, December 21, 1898.

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• And Nature takes no account of moral consequences, of arbitrary conditions which we create, and which we feel obliged to maintain at any cost.

  Kate Chopin

  Cost, Moral, Feels

  Kate Chopin (2016). “The Awakening”, p.151, Kate Chopin

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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

  Destiny, Existential, Stranger

  Martin Heidegger, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre (2016). “The Philosophical Library Existentialism Collection: Essays in Metaphysics, The Ethics of Ambiguity, and The Philosophy of Existentialism”, p.99, Open Road Media

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• Panentheistic doctrine contains all of deism and pandeism except their arbitrary negations.

  Charles Hartshorne

  Doctrine, Deism, Negation

  "Man's Vision of God and the Logic of Theism" by Charles Hartshorne, (p. 348), 1941.

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• Under budgetary pressure (arbitrary or not) it is truly remarkable how many options one discovers one can do without.

  James R. Schlesinger

  Pressure, Remarkable, Can Do

  James R. Schlesinger (1968). “Planning-programming-budgeting: Uses and Abuses of Analysis”

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• At times, in medicine, you feel you are inside a colossal and impossibly complex machine whose gears will turn for you only according to their own arbitrary rhythm. The notion that human caring, the effort to do better for people, might make a difference can seem hopelessly naive. But it isn't.

  Atul Gawande

  Caring, Medicine, Differences

  Atul Gawande (2010). “Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance”, p.10, Profile Books

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• The custom and fashion of today will be the awkwardness and outrage of tomorrow - so arbitrary are these transient laws.

  Alexandre Dumas

  Fashion, Law, Awkward

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• 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

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• Abstract understanding doesn't mean arbitrary sloshing and messing. Abstract art is controlled visual magic based on laws and methodology. Abstraction generally involves implication, suggestion and mystery rather that obvious description. Like a good poem, a good abstraction attacks your feelings before your understanding. Abstraction within realism adds zest and excitement to otherwise dull subject matter. Abstract understanding takes time and patience.

  Robert Genn

  Art, Mean, Zest

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• Will robot teachers replace human teachers? No, but they can complement them. Moreover, the could be sufficient in situations where there is no alternative––to enable learning while traveling, or while in remote locations, or when one wishes to study a topic for which there is not easy access to teachers. Robot teachers will help make lifelong learning a practicality. They can make it possible to learn no matter where one is in the world, no matter the time of day. Learning should take place when it is needed, when the learner is interested, not according to some arbitrary, fixed schedule

  Donald A. Norman

  Teacher, Wish, Robots

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• For there have risen many who have given to the plain words of Holy Writ some arbitrary interpretation of their own, instead of its true and only sense, and this in defiance of the clear meaning of words. Heresy lies in the sense assigned, not in the word written; the guilt is that of the expositor, not of the text.

  Hilary of Poitiers

  Lying, Guilt, Holy

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• Memory is a capricious and arbitrary creature. You never can tell what pebble she will pick up from the shore of life to keep among her treasures, or what inconspicuous flower of the field she will preserve as the symbol of "thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." . . . And yet I do not doubt that the most Important things are always the best remembered.

  Henry Van Dyke

  Life, Memories, Lying

  Henry Van Dyke (2015). “Little Rivers”, p.68, eKitap Projesi

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• From the first dawn of life, all organic beings are found to resemble each other in descending degrees, so that they can be classed in groups under groups. This classification is evidently not arbitrary like the grouping of stars in constellations.

  Charles Darwin

  Inspirational, Life, Stars

  Charles Darwin (1861). “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection; Or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”, p.358

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• History, is made up of the bad actions of extraordinary men and woman. All the most noted destroyers and deceivers of our species, all the founders of arbitrary governments and false religions have been extraordinary people; and nine tenths of the calamities that have befallen the human race had no other origin than the union of high intelligence with low desires.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Men, Race, People

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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.

  Mozah bint Nasser Al Missned

  Dream, Husband, Believe

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