Top 581 Arbitrary Quotes & Sayings

The truth is an arbitrary, shifting, culturally relative, and historically molded phenomenon.

It is not the source but the limitation of power which prevents it from being arbitrary.

All colours are arbitrary.

I wanted to make a movie about the arbitrary nature of love.

Fascism is [...] arbitrary rule by a charismatic head of state.

Why is it that we all - myself included - believe these stories? Why are we so quick to assume that the TSA is a bunch of jack-booted thugs, officious and arbitrary and drunk with power? It's because everything seems so arbitrary, because there's no accountability or transparency in the DHS.

A slave government is an oligarchy; and one, too, of the most arbitrary and criminal character.

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.

Those objecting to the concept of race argue that the taxonomic definitions are arbitrary and subjective.

The recommended daily allowances are based on arbitrary, unscientific, and tainted standards.

I couldn't write a political song. There's just opinion; it's all arbitrary anyway. It's all subjective.

Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it.

The most insupportable of tyrants exclaim against the exercise of arbitrary power.

The boundary between space and the earth is purely arbitrary. And I'll probably always be interested in this planet - it's my favorite.

I use color in a completely arbitrary way in order to express myself powerfully.

To me, length is an artificial and arbitrary factor in a film.

Valuation is vague and arbitrary, when there is no assurance that it will be generally acquiesced in by others.

According to scholars of linguistics, the relation between a word and its meaning is arbitrary.

Any appellative at all savouring of arbitrary rank is unsuitable to a man of liberal and catholic mind.

The most pernicious of all taxes are the arbitrary.

When will the arbitrary be granted the place it deserves in the formation of works and ideas?

I love that Voltaire was so willing to shock his readers with arbitrary cruelty. And I can completely relate to it.

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.

There were two main points I wanted to get across in Valentine, the first being that yes, Valentine's Day is an arbitrary day, but why would you not take that excuse to celebrate love? The second point. . .since it is just an arbitrary day. . .why not treat every day like Valentine's Day?

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.

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.

Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles.

The connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary.

Law and arbitrary power are at eternal enmity.

It's just strange to think that so much of our enjoyment from sports comes from the elevation of arbitrary differences.

Good and bad are really arbitrary words when it comes to character.

Habit is altogether too arbitrary a master for me to submit to.

We fought a revolution to free ourselves from arbitrary power and the whims of a monarch.

Charities are really good. To a certain extent, the ones you pick are arbitrary.

"...arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, and as a matter of law, unsupportable."

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

Arbitrary power is but the first natural step from anarchy, or the savage life.

So the time line of when we consider a fetus 'human' is arbitrary after conception.

I would like, in my arbitrary way, to bring one nearer to the actual human being.

Designs of purely arbitrary nature cannot be expected to last long.

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

Through an arbitrary problem, I had arrived at a tenet of good writing: brevity wins.

This, then, is freedom in the external life of man-that he is independent of the arbitrary power of his fellows.

There's a rule for what makes good fantasy work, and it's as strange as any riddle ever posed in a fairy tale: In fantasy, you can do anything; and therefore, the one thing you must not do is 'just anything.' Why? Because in a story where anything can happen and anything can be true, nothing matters. You have no reason to care what happens. It's all arbitrary, and arbitrary isn't interesting.

The intelligent ruler makes the law select men and makes no arbitrary appointment himself; he makes the law measure merits and makes no arbitrary judgment himself.

There could be constitutional problems with executive detention if it is seen to be arbitrary. I didn't actually say that the NSW Government's proposed anti-terrorism bill was necessarily unconstitutional - that was sloppy journalism - I said that executive detention may raise constitutional problems if it is seen to be arbitrary as being an invasion of the judicial function.

There's an arbitrary idea that the horizontal edge in a frame has to be the point of reference.

Art is arbitrary but it sort of reveals itself to be right or wrong anyway.

Art is not arbitrary. A fine painting is not there by accident; it is not arrived at by chance. We are sensitive to tonalities.

There is something so arbitrary about prizes.

All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.

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

I am a mortal enemy to arbitrary government and unlimited power.

Arbitrary benchmarks cheat kids out of a fulfilling education.

Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness.

The starting point and the ending point are nothing but two arbitrary choices. You make them as in soccer games, where they chose that it's 90 minutes, not less and not more. But the choices are the responsibility of the filmmaker. You have to choose to join the story at an arbitrary point, and you leave it at an arbitrary point.

Art is subject to arbitrary fashion.

In every society, the definitions of sanity and madness are arbitrary - are, in the largest sense, political.

Freedom is the emancipation from the arbitrary rule of other men.

Science is not a game in which arbitrary rules are used to decide what explanations are to be permitted.