Top 77 Arbitrary Quotes

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.

It’s a tragedy for society to spend decades training people and then depriving them of work at some arbitrary age.

The choices politicians make must be based on values – not an arbitrary, axe-wielding approach to public spending or a dismal exchange between Gordon Brown and David Cameron about percentages that sounds like an argument between different book-keepers.

I think the superstar thing is completely arbitrary. It’s all about who had a movie that did well one weekend. Then, if you have a movie that doesn’t do well the next weekend, then, all of the sudden, you’ve fallen from whatever. So it doesn’t really mean anything for me.

I don’t concern myself with thinking ahead to the finished product. I focus more specifically on what the character is experiencing. Once you relieve yourself of the very arbitrary and always punishing pressure of what an audience is expecting you to do, acting becomes a lot more fun and pure.

The London police have discovered that the best way to neuter demonstrations is not to move everyone on, or disperse troublemakers, but hold them close, cordon them into a diminishing space for hours and hours, as a sort of arbitrary al fresco arrest.

Laws fixed, certain, and uniform, are said to be the distinguishing traits of civilized from savage communities. In these last, seldom are any laws, unless it be the arbitrary and uncertain will of the strongest.

A lot of times, in a store, clothes appear strange to me, their cuts or flourishes arbitrary. Why is this look stylish now? How long will it be stylish for? It’s slightly embarrassing to admit this – because, as a novelist, I’m supposed to be observant – but I’m flummoxed by the way other women dress.

People who don’t like my work say that the connections seem too arbitrary. But that’s how life is.

We don’t sing about eating local produce or growing beards or anything like that. It’s funny to find yourself in a position where people associate you with things that are completely arbitrary to your songs.

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

Afghanistan’s borders are arbitrary, drawn to meet 19th-century political needs rather than to respect ethnic or religious patterns.

By questioning the very concept of a normal standard, especially as it applies to beauty and to hair type or texture, we can begin to see how arbitrary, narrow, and potentially destructive it is and course-correct ourselves on a path to where everybody gets love.

The Dinakaran episode has brought to the surface the vexed problem of the arbitrary and totally unsatisfactory manner of selecting and appointing judges as well as the unresolved problem of dealing with complaints of misconduct and corruption against judges.

Titles are relatively arbitrary to me; they take on meanings that aren’t really my meanings. ‘Sound Of Silver’ was just, like, I made the studio silver, and I wanted the record to sound ‘more silver.’

You know those award shows. The cliche is that it’s an honor just to be nominated, but that happens to be true. Whoever wins it in the end, I don’t know, sometimes it feels arbitrary. Sometimes it feels like it’s deserving.

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

I’m aware more than I was before I had books published that any review is a bit arbitrary – it’s not really, say, ‘The New York Times’ that’s authoritatively weighing in on the quality of a book, though it seems this way to the public.

Award shows are fun but completely arbitrary and absurd. And yet, I will watch every single one of them.

It is true, indeed, that the national domain is ours. It is true it was acquired by the valor and with the wealth of the whole nation. But we hold, nevertheless, no arbitrary power over it.

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

There is something so arbitrary about prizes.

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.

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.

Limitations, be they practical or arbitrary, force artists to dig more deeply instead of settling for easy answers.

It seems to me that evolution adds greatly to the wonder of life because it takes it out of the realm of the arbitrary, the exceptional, and links it to the sequence of natural causation.

I didn’t want to write a biographie romancee especially since I already write novels, nor did I want to challenge the rules of the biography game, arbitrary as those rules might be.

When I do solo material I definitely tend to overthink it. I make a lot of rules for myself that are a little bit arbitrary and… it’s just painful.

The great triumph of the Sixties was to dramatize just how arbitrary and constructed the seeming normality of the Fifties had been. We rose up from our maple-wood twin beds and fell onto the great squishy, heated water bed of the Sixties.

Be just and if you can’t be just, be arbitrary.

‘Arbitrary’ and ‘odd’ are the words which best describe the pattern of my career. I’m perpetually baffled by the whole thing.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

The press doesn’t just cover presidential campaigns, they influence them by making arbitrary decisions about who is ‘top tier’ and merits coverage.

International carriers need to be given greater role in our skies on all routes like several other large countries to make our aviation industry more efficient and competitive and prevent arbitrary pricing by monopolies.

Most of the things that have happened in my life have been pretty arbitrary. I walk into a room, and someone hits me with a two-by-four, and that changes my life. I’m not sure what I’ve learned from anything.

As a Jew, I was taught that it was ethically imperative to speak up and to speak out against arbitrary state violence. That was part of what I learned when I learned about the Second World War and the concentration camps.

When America pays lip service but little more to horrors like the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi, instead proclaiming convenient but arbitrary loopholes in our moral obligations, we just give the world’s worst bullies more ammunition and power.

What we don’t need in country music is divisiveness, public criticism of each other, and some arbitrary judgement of what belongs and what doesn’t.

If an educational act is to be efficacious, it will be only that one which tends to help toward the complete unfolding of life. To be thus helpful it is necessary rigorously to avoid the arrest of spontaneous movements and the imposition of arbitrary tasks.

I got into acting as a young child on account of a sort of arbitrary thing. A friend of my mom’s was a casting director, so really, as kind of a lark, I had a couple of acting jobs that had just enough exposure to give me the option to continue if I wanted to. I followed through with it.

Understand that legal and illegal are political, and often arbitrary, categorizations; use and abuse are medical, or clinical, distinctions.

It’s easier for me to remember things based on the releases of albums. The year is such an arbitrary thing.

The possession of arbitrary power has always, the world over, tended irresistibly to destroy humane sensibility, magnanimity, and truth.

Usually I am on a work for a long stretch, until a moment arrives when the air of the arbitrary vanishes, and the paint falls into positions that feel destined.

Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people.

Ours was a pork-free household. The rules were arbitrary but strict: No pork in the house, ever. Except for the occasional pepperoni pizza. Or maybe Hawaiian.

Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

I believe that nothing so arbitrary as money should be able to come between a person and the means of survival. And that’s a really fancy way of saying that it doesn’t matter if you’re poor – you should have top-quality health care.

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

One of the very basic ideas of Post-Modernism is rejection of arbitrary power structures. Different people are sensitive to different kinds of power structures.

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