"Arbitrariness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the twentieth century. The antithesis is the old antithesis between order and progress; between coercion and independence; between the public voice, or, if we like to phrase it so, the public conscience, and the arbitrariness and irresponsibility of individual units. Or we might put the problem in a still wider form. A patriot is a man who believes intensely in the rights of his own nationality. But if we have to form a United States of Europe we shall have gradually to soften, diminish, ...
— Armageddon—And After • W. L. Courtney
... Economics, Yale University, member International Tax Conference: Probably nothing more effectually discourages investment than uncertainty as to future costs. And whatever may be said of the present system of taxation, there can be no question of its arbitrariness and uncertainty. If to all the other risks of forestry we add uncertainty as to what the taxes are going to be, we cannot blame investors for some hesitation in embarking on an enterprise which may have to pay taxes fifty years before the returns come in. And more than this; the ...
— Practical Forestry in the Pacific Northwest • Edward Tyson Allen
... The arbitrariness and illegality of the proceeding were so evident that the 'Senatus-consulte' contained no mention of the transactions of the 3d Nivose, which was very remarkable. It was, however, declared that the measure of the previous day had been adopted with a view to the ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... grown so self-reliant and reflective. More, it might even help Him to get through His infinitely complex and difficult work. Theology has already moved toward such notions. It has abandoned the primitive doctrine of God's arbitrariness and indifference, and substituted the doctrine that He is willing, and even eager, to hear the desires of His creatures—i. e., their private notions, born of experience, as to what would be best for them. Why assume that those notions would be any the less worth hearing ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... monarchy and at the same time of patriotic independence, negotiations began between the estates and the court; and they lasted from the 28th of February to the 12th of March, but without result. At bottom, the question lay between absolute power and free government, between arbitrariness and legality; and, on this field, both parties were determined not to accept a serious and final defeat. Unmoved by the loyal concessions and assurances they received, the advisers of the crown thought no longer of anything but getting ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume III. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... their fellow-men—mercy! Mercy for those false tales which they have imposed upon the people, for those false tales of the higher endowments of princes, of inherited wisdom which raises them above the rest of mankind—mercy for their arbitrariness, their pride, and their insolence—mercy for a poor beggar, who, until then, had called himself ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... humanizing influence of the trade thus encouraged, I see nations become the friends of nations, and the causes of war disappear. I see the influence of the great republic in the amelioration of the condition of the poor and the oppressed in every land, and in the moderation of the arbitrariness of power. Upon the wings of free trade will be carried the seeds of free government, to be scattered everywhere to grow and ripen into harvests of free peoples in every ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... by the disdainful demeanor and grudging disposition of the Supreme Council, and irritated by the arbitrariness of its decrees and the indefensible way in which it applied principles that were propounded as sacred. Before restoring the diminutive cantons of Eupen and Malmedy to Belgium, for example, Mr. Wilson insisted on ascertaining ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... dogmatic air clinging to the critical introductions to the study of the Old Testament, their authors have not shrunk from treating the book sacred to two religions with childish arbitrariness. Since the days of Spinoza's essay at rationalistic explanation, Bible criticism has been the wrestling-ground of the most extravagant exegesis, of bold hypotheses, and hazardous conjectures. No Latin or Greek classic ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... about the same predicament, before William the Conqueror came in his own way to their help and rescued them from this maze. In the transaction which took place, the Anglo-Saxon and the French both gave up the arbitrariness of their genders; nouns denoting male beings became masculine, those denoting female beings became feminine; all the others became neuter; wife and maiden resumed their sex, while nation, sun and moon were ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... island in the centre, and so much attention did this innovation attract that the great minister was popularly called Shima (island) no o-omi. His office of o-omi was conferred on his son, Emishi, who behaved with even greater arrogance and arbitrariness than his father had shown. The Empress Suiko died in 628, and the question of the accession at once became acute. Two princes were eligible; Tamura, grandson of the Emperor Bidatsu, and Yamashiro, son of Shotoku Taishi. Prince ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... boarding-houses that faced the sea, were as new as the pantomime songs of last Christmas or this year's slang. One might conceive them being designed by architects who knew as little of the past as children know of death, and painted by fresh-faced people to match themselves, and there was a romping arbitrariness about the design and decoration of the place which struck the same note ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... the Chevalier, quite beside himself, 'you have made me a beggar, but you must be insane to imagine that you could win my wife. Are we on the islands? is my wife a slave, exposed as a mere thing to the brutal arbitrariness of a reprobate man, that he may trade with her, gamble with her? But it is true! You would have had to pay twenty thousand ducats if the queen had won, and so I have lost all right to raise a protest if my wife is willing to leave me to follow you. ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... remembered with gratitude by those who were the recipients of them. Rossetti was king of his circle, and it must be said, that in all that properly constituted kingship, he took care to rule. There was then a certain determination of purpose which occasionally had the look of arbitrariness, and sometimes, it is alleged, a disregard of opposing opinion which partook of tyranny: but where heart and not head were in question, he was assuredly the most urbane and amiable of monarchs. In matters of taste in art, or criticism ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... excused this by his maxim that the interests of the land must be defended with the resources of the land,[42] but we can conceive how, on the boundary line between two different systems, acts of violence, which combined the arbitrariness of the one with the principles of the other, caused a general agitation. In the year 1297 the spiritual lords under their archbishop, as well as the temporal ones (who denied the obligation to serve beyond the sea) under the Constable and Marshal, set themselves energetically ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... and lifted her back like a feather into the midst of a group of five gendarmes, who started up as one man; for in that guardroom everything is regarded as suspicious. The proceeding was arbitrary, but the arbitrariness was necessary. The young lawyer himself had cried out twice, "Madame! madame!" in his horror, so much did he fear finding himself ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... vessels that the clay is moulded; God is revealed not as predestining character or quality, but as shaping characters for ends for which under His hand they yield suitable qualities. The parable illustrates not arbitrariness of election nor irresistible sovereignty but a double freedom—freedom in God to change His decrees for moral reasons, freedom on man's part to thwart God's designs for him. In further illustration of this remember again the wonderful words, Be thou not dismayed before ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... which disappeared and reappeared capriciously with the arbitrariness of dreams, was always telling him the same thing. Freya was Dona Constanza perpetuated across the centuries, taking on a new form. She was born of the union of a German and an Italian, just like this other one.... But the chaste empress ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... went on around him. Half a dozen girls chatted eagerly, excitedly, in response to certain arguments advanced by young men who had the expedition in hand. Arrangements were being discussed, approved or set aside with an arbitrariness that left no choice to the proposers. From time to time disputed questions were referred to the tall young man at the mantelpiece. He appeared to be a person of consequence in the eyes of all; his decision ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... has missed the target, it must be repeated. This is the more urgent, inasmuch as the faction has thrown off the mask and "honest people"[2601] on all sides become indignant at seeing the Constitution subject to the arbitrariness of the lowest class. Nearly all the higher administrative bodies, seventy-five of the department directories,[2602] give in their adhesion to Lafayette's letter, or respond by supporting the proclamation, so noble and so moderate, in which the King, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... of reason? Utterly unknown. Then why not agree with the proposition, gentlemen, that our profession is to some extent as it were a correction of the excessive accumulation of values in the hands of individuals, and serves as a protest against all the hardships, abominations, arbitrariness, violence, and negligence of the human personality, against all the monstrosities created by the bourgeois capitalistic organisation of modern society? Sooner or later, this order of things will assuredly be overturned by the social revolution. ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... the history of art and morals of the previous century shows us how at that time discordant spirits nevertheless wrestled with one another on common ground, the excess of fantastic arbitrariness with the most sober, universal pedantry, I call it simply a struggle of the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... the unfairness and malignancy of the attack its no less disconcerting arbitrariness and fortuitousness, and the path of the American author is seen to be strewn with formidable entanglements indeed. With the law what it is, he is quite unable to decide a priori what is permitted by the ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... however, firm in his resistance to ecclesiastical arbitrariness. The prelates complained to him on one occasion that Christianity was going to the dogs, because no one feared their excommunications, and prayed that he would order his sergeants to lend the secular arm to enforce their authority. "Yes," answered ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... the gift of leadership in a marked degree, and established his authority by a due mixture of kindness and severity. Those boys whom he honored with his confidence were absolutely attached to him. Those whom, with magnificent arbitrariness, he punished and persecuted, felt meekly that they had probably deserved it; and if they had not, it was ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... mayest freely eat. God grudges you nothing good for you. He has put you into this good and pleasant world, where you will find pleasures enough, and comforts enough, to satisfy you, if you are wise; but there are things which God has forbidden you, not out of any spite or arbitrariness, but because they are bad for you; because they will hurt you if you indulge in them, and sooner or later, kill both body ...
— True Words for Brave Men • Charles Kingsley
... curious than these mutations of theological opinion. The monarchical type of sovereignty was, for example, so ineradicably planted in the mind of our own forefathers that a dose of cruelty and arbitrariness in their deity seems positively to have been required by their imagination. They called the cruelty "retributive justice," and a God without it would certainly have struck them as not "sovereign" enough. But today we abhor the very notion of eternal suffering inflicted; and that arbitrary ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... the ruin of her pleasant old friendship. Her nineteen years of governess-ship had shown her more of the shady side of high life than was known to her brother or her friend. She knew that, whatever the owner may be at the outset, it is the tendency of wealth and power to lead to arbitrariness and impatience of contradiction and censure, and to exact approval and adulation. Even if Caroline Brownlow's own nature should, at five-and-thirty, be too much confirmed in sweetness and generosity to succumb to such temptation, her children ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... — N. no choice, Hobson's choice; first come first served, random selection; necessity &c 601; not a pin to choose &c (equality) 27; any, the first that comes; that or nothing. neutrality, indifference; indecision &c (irresolution) 605; arbitrariness. coercion (compulsion) 744. V. be neutral &c adj.; have no choice, have no election; waive, not vote; abstain from voting, refrain from voting; leave undecided; make a virtue of necessity [Two Gentlemen]. Adj. neutral, neuter; indifferent, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... dialectics we are to understand the connections and sequences of ideas themselves, in the hope of eliminating every arbitrariness and conventionality within a system of truth that is pure and self-luminous rationality. To this science, which is the great interest of his later years, Plato contributes only incomplete studies and experiments. We must be satisfied with the playful answer with ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... did not meet with a vigorous resistance even on this point, and could also appeal to the oldest tradition. The arbitrariness in the number, derivation and designation of the AEons was contested. The aversion to barbarism also co-operated here, in so far as Gnosticism delighted in mysterious words borrowed from the Semites. But the Semitic element attracted ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... of Mrs. Travis, he was conscious of his own arbitrariness, but, having once committed himself to a point of view, he could not withdraw from it. He had to find fault with his wife and her society, and here was an obvious resource. Its very obviousness should, ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... possible categories, their arbitrariness and spontaneity, may, however, have this inconvenience, that the categories may be irrelevant to one another no less than to the natural life they ought to express. The experience they respectively synthesise may therefore be no single experience. One pictured world may succeed ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... nature is in some ways arbitrary, the arbitrariness is always in the interest of simplicity. The book does have simplicity, permits instant reference, and provides an adequate drill which may be assigned at the ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever |
