"Arbitrariness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... bustle of the other; at least, as we are so often forced to see it acted. In RICHARD II the weakness of the king leaves us leisure to take a greater interest in the misfortunes of the man. 'After the first act, in which the arbitrariness of his behaviour only proves his want of resolution, we see him staggering under the unlooked-for blows of fortune, bewailing his loss of kingly power; not preventing it, sinking under the aspiring ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... 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 ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... 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 ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... masculine head, a feminine hand, and a neuter heart."[405] Anglo-Saxon gentlemen were in 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 neuter. Nouns and adjectives lost ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... was a good leader, for he confessed himself a follower in the enterprise which he was in a position absolutely to control. He eagerly availed himself of the suggestions of others, took a quiet and lowly place with entire dignity, and exerted without arbitrariness a determining influence. ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... 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 speedily rid of the presence ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume III. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... agitation in Sphakia, which preceded the great insurrection, having already begun, and making my venturing there imprudent. I was anxious to see something of the provincial government of the island, as, in Canea, where the foreign consuls resided, there was always the slight check of publicity on the arbitrariness of the official, though what we saw did not indicate a very effective one. I had a dragoman in Retimo, a well-to-do merchant, who served for the honor and protection the post gave him, and his house was mine pro tem., and ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... peace-makers of 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, ...
— Armageddon—And After • W. L. Courtney
... Thus human arbitrariness has driven divine necessity from scientific logic. If I mention the names of Sigwart, Mach, Ostwald, Pearson, Milhaud, Poincare, Duhem, Ruyssen, those of you who are students will easily identify the tendency I speak of, and will think of ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... instrumental, by God, to fight down the enemies of God, and his people, in the three nations. And truly, until my hands were bound, and I was limited, (to my own great satisfaction, as many can bear me witness,) while I had in my hands so great a power and arbitrariness—the soldiery were a very considerable part of these nations, especially all government being dissolved. I say, when all government was thus dissolved, and nothing to keep things in order but the sword!" There can be no doubt of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... words, in cries, in gestures. Well, now, for example, I am reading a description of some pogrom or of a slaughter in jail, or of a riot being put down. Of course, the policemen are described, these servants of arbitrariness, these lifeguards of contemporaneousness, striding up to their knees in blood, or how else do they write in such cases? Of course, it is revolting and it hurts, and is disgusting, but all this is felt by the mind, and not the heart. But here I am walking along Lebyazhia Street, ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... operations of the siege Bolvar did not neglect his usual administrative work. He organized a system of military justice so as to avoid the arbitrariness of the military chieftains and, being aware that Piar had tried to foster the disloyalty of Mario, he endeavored to convince him of his folly, and said very plainly that unless these machinations were stopped, great evils must ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... Madame la Baronne, seized her by the middle, 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 ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... preached to all the elect. There are correlated complexities, miracles, absurdities, in wrought with the whole theory, inseparable from it. The violence it does to nature, to thought, to love, to morals, its arbitrariness, its mechanical form, the wrenching exegesis by which alone it can be forced from the Bible,7 its glaring partiality and eternal cruelty, are its sufficient refutation and condemnation. If the death of Christ has such wondrous saving efficacy, and nothing else has, what keeps him ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... arbitrariness about the way in which great success is allotted in this world. Who shall say that in one case out of every two, relative success is in proportion to relative merit? Nor need this be said in anything of a grumbling or captious spirit. It is but repeating ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... being wholly in the hands of the new Earl, till the failure of his health compelled his temporary retirement from public life. Lord Chatham was brother-in-law to Mr. Grenville, to whom in the occasional arrogance and arbitrariness of his disposition he bore some resemblance; and one of the earliest acts of his administration, when coupled with the language which he held on the subject in the House of Lords, displayed that side of his character in a ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... have seen) it is for service as 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 ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... and repent, and pray to God for what they seldom granted to 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 a rich and ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... tarn, are specially delightful to him, because the hearing is the most spiritual of our senses; and these sounds, like the cuckoo's cry, seem to convert the earth into an 'unsubstantial fairy place.' The phrase 'association' indeed implies a certain arbitrariness in the images suggested, which is not quite in accordance with Wordsworth's feeling. Though the echo depends partly upon the hearer, the mountain voices are specially adapted for certain moods. They have, ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... say so—physiological and psychological, and though that austere severity of pure line and pure color, the impersonal technique of art, has a seemingly pre-ordained power of appeal, in reality it is far less immutable than it appears, and has far more in it of the arbitrariness of life and growth and change than we sometimes ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... 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 preservation ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... Russian Government, on the other hand, has been marked by that inconsistency, political blindness, and arbitrariness which one expects from an irresponsible bureaucracy. For ninety years Finland was left alone to work out her own salvation, entirely apart from that of the rest of the Empire; and then suddenly it was discovered ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... persecutions which were directed against the Jews on the ground of their "economic injuriousness," The fact that the Jewish population was in many regards outside the operation of the general laws of Russia opened up a wide field for the grossest forms of arbitrariness and lawlessness. At one stroke, all the exits from the overcrowded cities into the villages within the Pale of Settlement were tightly closed. All branches of industry connected with Jewish land ownership outside the cities were curtailed and ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... farmers and factors with particular abhorrence, and numerous attempts were made at different periods to put a stop to the grievous exaction, but the progress of public opinion was so little advanced, and the regard for the ancient trammels of feudal arbitrariness so deep-seated, that not until 1781 was any serious resistance made. In that year a person named Johnston stood upon what he considered his rights, and would allow no acquaintance to be made between his ...
— Bygone Punishments • William Andrews
... of which expressions we may learn the mere conventionality and the utter arbitrariness of even our most important ethical terms. How prodigiously cheap is the application of any such epithets, considering the terrible abuse they have undergone! And how poor is that philosophy that can concentrate 'politeness' and 'civility' in the frippery and heartlessness of mere ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... dared to write to the board, and which I am ashamed to say we have suffered." Whatever that letter may be, I will venture to say there is not a word or syllable in it that tastes of such insolence and arbitrariness with regard to the servants of the Company, his fellow-servants, of such audacious rebellion with regard to the laws of his country, as are contained in this minute ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... our own experience and therefore refuse to look for it there. If we were sure of our ground, we should be willing to acquiesce in the naturally different feelings and ways of others, as a man who is conscious of speaking his language with the accent of the capital confesses its arbitrariness with gayety, and is pleased and interested in the variations of it he observes in provincials; but the provincial is always zealous to show that he has reason and ancient authority to justify his oddities. ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... and took the consequences. He expressly says in more places than one that the science of Government is only a science of combinations, applications, and exceptions, according to time, place, and circumstance.[226] But to base society on conventions is to impute an element of arbitrariness to these combinations and applications, and to make them independent, as they can never be, of the limits inexorably fixed by the nature of things. The notion of compact is the main source of all the worst vagaries in Rousseau's ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... 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 ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... once loved "Thou-shalt": now is it forced to find illusion and arbitrariness even in the holiest things, that it may capture freedom from its love: the lion is needed for ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... and three livres the hour for the bailiff. The black brood of judicial leeches suck so much the more eagerly, because the more numerous, a still more scrawny prey, having paid for the privilege of sucking it.[1351] The arbitrariness, the corruption, the laxity of such a regime can be divined. "Impunity," says Renauldon, "is nowhere greater than in the seigniorial tribunals. . . . The foulest crimes obtain no consideration there," for the seignior ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... made Bonaparte the most gentle and conciliatory of men in some directions; in others they developed and hardened his imperiousness. His correspondence mirrors both his mildness and his arbitrariness. His letters to the Directory abound in praise of his officers and men, accompanied by demands for the promotion of those who had performed distinguished services. Writing to General Clarke on November nineteenth, ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... content, like most men of ability, with quietly and unobtrusively despising. The contempt he felt he did not pay sufficient deference to human nature to hide. It was inevitable that the self-love of many should be offended by the arbitrariness and imperiousness with which he overrode their opinions, and still more by the unequivocal disdain manifested for them. It must be conceded, also, that to those for whom he felt indifference or dislike, he had in no slight degree that capacity of making ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... so are his requirements raised. The annuity secured by the insurance must therefore be variable, if its object is to be completely attained. Consequently, the premiums are regulated by the height of the profits of labour for the time being. Certainly the inevitable arbitrariness of the connection between the premium and the claim of the insured is thereby magnified; but we do not allow that to trouble us. Our experts have taken into consideration, with the most scrupulous attempt at accuracy, all the appertaining factors, and the premiums—the rates of which have, since ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... 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 ...
— Practical Forestry in the Pacific Northwest • Edward Tyson Allen |
