These arbitrary quotes will inspire you. Arbitrary, based on random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging arbitrary quotes, arbitrary sayings, and arbitrary proverbs.
Best Arbitrary Quotes
- “If any man’s money can be taken by a so-called government, without his own personal consent, all his other rights are taken with it; for with his money the government can, and will, hire soldiers to stand over him, compel him to submit to its arbitrary will, and kill him if he resists.” ~ Lysander Spooner
- “Freedom is the emancipation from the arbitrary rule of other men.” ~ Mortimer Adler
- “Suffering by nature or chance never seems so painful as suffering inflicted on us by the arbitrary will of another.” ~ Arthur Schopenhauer.
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“The love of domination and an uncontrolled lust of arbitrary power have prevailed among all nations and perhaps in proportion to the degrees of civilization.” ~ Mercy Otis Warren
- “I believe there should be no arbitrary date set for withdrawal and yet no permanent, unending deployment. No cut and run, yet measured progress in helping a people who want to be free without an illusion of overnight success.” ~ Rick Renzi
- “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.” ~ Maria Montessori
- “The arbitrary rule of a just and enlightened prince is always bad. His virtues are the most dangerous and the surest form of seduction: they lull a people imperceptibly into the habit of loving, respecting, and serving his successor, whoever that successor may be, no matter how wicked or stupid.” ~ Denis Diderot
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“Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles.” ~ George Jean Nathan
- “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.” ~ Margaret Mead
- “I don’t know who decided that skinny was more appealing than not skinny. It seems arbitrary.” ~ Gwyneth Paltrow
- “Arbitrary power is like most other things which are very hard, very liable to be broken.” ~ Abigail Adams
- “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.” ~ Charley Pride
- “Gold and silver, like other commodities, have an intrinsic value, which is not arbitrary, but is dependent on their scarcity, the quantity of labour bestowed in procuring them, and the value of the capital employed in the mines which produce them.” ~ David Ricardo
- “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.” ~ Francoise Sagan
- “For me writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz.” ~ Francoise Sagan
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“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” ~ Edmund White
- “Any Congressional agreement of an arbitrary time table to bring our troops home before we have accomplished our mission is unacceptable and could potentially increase the risk to our soldiers.” ~ James T. Walsh
- “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.” ~ Margaret Mead
- “All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.” ~ Marshall McLuhan
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“Be just and if you can’t be just, be arbitrary.” ~ William S. Burroughs
- “Aside from that reservation, a fictive tale even has the advantage of manifesting symbolic necessity more purely to the extent that we may believe its conception arbitrary.” ~ Jacques Lacan
- “Arbitrary benchmarks cheat kids out of a fulfilling education.” ~ James Dyson
- “The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired.” ~ Stephen Hawking
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“Understand that legal and illegal are political, and often arbitrary, categorizations; use and abuse are medical, or clinical, distinctions.” ~ Abbie Hoffman
- “A government that can at pleasure accuse, shoot, and hang men, as traitors, for the one general offence of refusing to surrender themselves and their property unreservedly to its arbitrary will, can practice any and all special and particular oppressions it pleases.” ~ Lysander Spooner
- “Good and bad are really arbitrary words when it comes to character.” ~ Anson Mount
- “Art is subject to arbitrary fashion.” ~ Kary Mullis
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“Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people.” ~ John Quincy Adams
- “The desire for liberty has also made itself felt as struggle against domestic tyranny or arbitrary rule.” ~ Emily Greene Balch
- “Standards of beauty are arbitrary. Body shame exists only to the extent that our physiques don’t match our own beliefs about how we should look.” ~ Martha Beck
- “The laws and conditions of the production of wealth partake of the character of physical truths. There is nothing optional or arbitrary in them … It is not so with the Distribution of Wealth. That is a matter of human institution solely. The things once there, mankind, individually or collectively, can do with them as they like.” ~ John Stuart Mill
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“Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness.” ~ George Washington
- “Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of citizens to keep and bear arms. This is not to say that firearms should not be very carefully used and that definite safety rules of precaution should not be taught and enforced. But the right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, and one more safeguard against tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible.” ~ Hubert H. Humphrey
- “The heights of popularity and patriotism are still the beaten road to power and tyranny; flattery to treachery; standing armies to arbitrary government; and the glory of God to the temporal interest of the clergy.” ~ David Hume
- “A sort of war of revenge on the intellect is what, for some reason, thrives in the contemporary social atmosphereThe ideas of a time are like the clothes of a season: they are as arbitrary, as much imposed by some superior will which is seldom explicit. They are utilitarian and political, the instruments of smooth-running government.” ~ Wyndham Lewis
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“The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.” ~ Henry James
- “”Pieces” almost always appear ‘as parts’ in whole processes. … To sever a “‘part” from the organized whole in which it occurs-whether it itself be a subsidiary whole or an “element”-is a very real process usually involving alterations in that “part”. Modifications of a part frequently involve changes elsewhere in the whole itself. Nor is the nature of these alterations arbitrary, for they too are determined by whole-conditions.” ~ Max Wertheimer
- “The ideas of a time are like the clothes of a season: they are as arbitrary, as much imposed by some superior will which is seldom explicit.” ~ Wyndham Lewis
- “But in the present century, thanks in good part to the influence of Hilbert, we have come to see that the unproved postulates with which we start are purely arbitrary. They must be consistent, they had better lead to something interesting.” ~ Julian Coolidge
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“According to scholars of linguistics, the relation between a word and its meaning is arbitrary.” ~ Roy Blount, Jr.
- “You hear a lot about God these days: God, the beneficent; God, the all-great; God, the Almighty; God, the most powerful; God, the giver of life; God, the creator of death. I mean, we’re hearing about God all the time, so we better learn how to deal with it. But if we know anything about God, God is arbitrary.” ~ Bob Dylan
- “Neither dead nor alive, the hostage is suspended by an incalculable outcome. It is not his destiny that awaits for him, nor his own death, but anonymous chance, which can only seem to him something absolutely arbitrary. He is in a state of radical emergency, of virtual extermination.” ~ Jean Baudrillard
- “I am really sorry to see my countrymen trouble themselves about politics. If men were wise, the most arbitrary princes could not hurt them. If they are not wise, the freest government is compelled to be a tyranny. Princes appear to me to be fools. Houses of Commons and Houses of Lords appear to me to be fools; they seem to me to be something else besides human life.” ~ William Blake
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“Considered logically this concept is not identical with the totality of sense impressions referred to; but it is an arbitrary creation of the human (or animal) mind.” ~ Albert Einstein
- “To divide one’s life by years is of course to tumble into a trap set by our own arithmetic. The calendar consents to carry on its dull wall-existence by the arbitrary timetables we have drawn up in consultation with those permanent commuters, Earth and Sun. But we, unlike trees, need grow no annual rings.” ~ Clifton Fadiman
- “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.” ~ Vaclav Havel
- “That is not a just government, nor is property secure under it, where the property which a man has in his personal safety and personal liberty, is violated by arbitrary seizures of one class of citizens for the service of the rest.” ~ James Madison
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“Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.” ~ H. L. Mencken
- “The right of citizens to bear arms is just one guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible.” ~ Hubert H. Humphrey
- “How on earth can religious people believe in so much arbitrary, clearly invented balderdash?….The acceptance of a creed, any creed, entitles the acceptor to membership in the sort of artificial extended family we call a congregation. It is a way to fight loneliness. Any time I see a person fleeing from reason and into religion, I think to myself, There goes a person who simply cannot stand being so goddamned lonely anymore.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut
- “Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people. When the people give way, their deceivers, betrayers and destroyers press upon them so fast that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachments is to, grow every day more encroaching; like a cancer, it eats faster and faster every hour.” ~ John Adams
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“The possession of arbitrary power has always, the world over, tended irresistibly to destroy humane sensibility, magnanimity, and truth.” ~ Frederick Law Olmsted
- “In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs.” ~ Edith Wharton
- “Science is not a game in which arbitrary rules are used to decide what explanations are to be permitted.” ~ Michael Behe
- “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.” ~ Philip Guston
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“They were saying computers deal with numbers. This was absolutely nonsense. Computers deal with arbitrary information of any kind.” ~ Ted Nelson
- “Those objecting to the concept of race argue that the taxonomic definitions are arbitrary and subjective.” ~ J. Philippe Rushton
- “[I]f vice and corruption prevail, liberty cannot subsist; but if virtue have the advantage, arbitrary power cannot be established.” ~ Algernon Sidney
- “Not to be offensive, not to be capricious, not to be arbitrary, not to be neurotic, not to be an actor outer, you’re just trying to get in and you’re given so little time to get in gently, but it’s always hard.” ~ William Hurt
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“To me, length is an artificial and arbitrary factor in a film.” ~ Frank Darabont
- “Thus the creation, which seems an arbitrary act, supposes laws as invariable as those of the fatality of the Atheists. It would be absurd to say that the Creator might govern the world without those rules, since without them it could not subsist.” ~ Baron de Montesquieu
- “I wanted to make a movie about the arbitrary nature of love.” ~ Adrian Lyne
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“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.” ~ Larry Wall
- “Because the Illinois death penalty system is arbitrary and capricious – and therefore immoral – I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death.” ~ George Ryan
- “Personally, I don’t like the term ‘success.’ It’s too arbitrary and too relative a thing. It’s usually someone else’s definition, not yours.” ~ Ichiro Suzuki
