"Arbitrariness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and charged them with false doctrine and apostasy from the Lutheran Church. Says the aforementioned Tennessee Report: "Even though the officers with their adherents (die alten Herrn Beamten mit ihrem Zugehoer) could perhaps themselves have thought so far [as to realize the arbitrariness of their procedure with reference to the 'Untimely Synod'], yet the desire to organize the General Synod and to bring about a union with all religious bodies, especially with the Presbyterians, was so strong as to outweigh everything else" [even an imminent breach]. The leaders ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 1: Early History of American Lutheranism and The Tennessee Synod • Friedrich Bente
... 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. So people who have no sensations, ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... upon the minds of those under our authority. Whenever you wish to depart from the usual routine, there is a good reason for the change, and in most cases the reason can be stated with the request. When this is done the order loses the appearance of arbitrariness. If you say to Mary, "I wish you would go out without me this afternoon, as I have some important sewing to finish," you will most likely meet with ready acquiescence. If, however, you say, "You must go alone this afternoon, I can't go with you," and if when Mary ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... 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 ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... 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 that her coasts were of the highest strategical importance, ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... European 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 ...
— Armageddon—And After • W. L. Courtney
... thus prepared to see her. The sergeant flew after 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 himself ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... Much of Jackson's arbitrariness sprung from a foolish whim of his, taking his election as equivalent to the enactment of all his peculiar ideas into law. Ours is a government of the people, he said; the people had spoken in his election, and had willed so and so. Woe to any senator or representative who opposed! This was, ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... That is because we rest at peace in a status which is conventional and accustomed. Variation from it one way is fastidious; the other way is indecent, just as it would be at any other limit whatever. It is the comparison of the mores of different times and peoples which shows the arbitrariness and conventionality. It would be difficult to mention anything in Oriental mores which we regard with such horror as Orientals feel for low-necked dresses and round dances. Orientals use dress to conceal the contour of the form. The waist ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... to bear upon this mass of impressions which is our "universe" the full rhythmic play of our complete identity this weirdness and arbitrariness disappear and we realize that we are, not this thought or this sensation or even this stream of thoughts and sensations, but the definite living "monad" which gives these things their only link of continuity and permanence. And ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... indeed, please Him to find His creatures 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 ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... Archbishop Trench, "they either say nothing at all or say something erroneous." Classical has more to defend it than Romantic, because it has greater antiquity and, in one sense, has been used with less arbitrariness. ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... fine days, a fine view is rare unless it is an early one. We deplore this unhappy trait of the weather and deeply resent its arbitrariness. But resentment is fruitless under a despotism. And there is after all a certain glow of superciliousness in being up early; the feat once accomplished, it brings its own reward; one feels a comforting disdain for the napping thousands who are losing the crisp, unbreathed freshness ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... position 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 - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... 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 their ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... 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
... distinguished church historian has said, the God of the Middle Ages was a God of arbitrariness—the more arbitrary the more Godlike. By frequent interferences with the regular course of events he made his existence clear, reassured his children of his continued solicitude, and frustrated the plots of the Evil ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... by the "test of the imagination," the "test of fairyland." "The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, 'charm,' 'spell,' 'enchantment.' They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery. A tree grows fruit because it is a magic tree. Water runs down-hill because it is bewitched." The so-called "laws of nature" are not one whit less mysterious because of their uniformity. And again: "It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... and feeling of the one to the noise and 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 genius of Bolingbroke, his authority trampled on, his hopes failing ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... changes are more 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
... wait patiently for many a long year ere his trees greet him with white flowers which pour out perfume of rare density and enrich him with golden fruit almost as big as footballs. From nine to twelve years must elapse, but expectancy is not wholly measurable by the arbitrariness of time. The true standard is the desire, tempered by the patience of ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... down heavy stakes, his eye was quick to discern, his hand prompt to reward the merit of the buccaneer; and those who followed his soaring fortunes knew that they would share them. If he was prompt to reward, he was also stern in punishment, and a certain arbitrariness both in reward and punishment made the soldier feel that the commander's will was law. If Wallenstein was not the boon companion of the mercenaries, he was their divinity, and he was himself essentially one of them—even his superstition was theirs, and filled the same void of faith in his as ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... including those of petition, assembly, free speech, and equality before the law in all matters pertaining to the protection of person and property. It likewise undertakes to guarantee the individual against partiality and arbitrariness in the administration of justice. Except in unusual cases, prescribed by law, no one may be taken into custody except upon a warrant issued by a judge, stating specifically the reason for arrest. No one may be removed against his will from the jurisdiction of the tribunal in which he has a right ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... The arbitrariness of the non-Messianic interpretation manifests itself in this also, that its supporters can, up to this day, not agree as to the subject of the prophecy. 1. According to several interpreters—Hitzig, last of all—the Servant of God is to be Israel, and ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... is doubtful whether a belief which involved the establishment of a direct connection between the most prominent stars—the planets with the chief gods—ever enjoyed popular favor in Babylonia. The association is marked by an artificiality and a certain arbitrariness that stamps it not only as the product of theological schools, but as a thought that would remain confined to a limited circle of the population. Jensen suggests[818] that the planets may at one time ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... Greek; indirect speech in Latin; negatives, comparisons, etc., etc., in all languages.) Esperanto—none. Common sense the only guide, and no ambiguity in practice. The perfect limpidity of Esperanto, with no syntactical rules, is a most instructive proof of the conventionality and arbitrariness of the niceties of syntax in national languages. After all, the subjunctive was made for man and ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... sittings at three livres the hour for the advocate 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 dreads supplying the means for a criminal trial, while ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... brother, if it will pain you to extend it]; and this for the sake of preserving a temporary peace to herself; which was the less worth endeavouring to preserve, as it always produced a strength in the will of others, which subjected her to an arbitrariness that of course grew, and became established, upon her patience.—And now to give up the most deserving of her children (against her judgment) a sacrifice to the ambition and selfishness of the least deserving!—But I fly from this subject—having I fear, said too ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... 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' ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various |
