Science fiction writers put characters into a world with arbitrary rules and work out what happens.
Who cares if they throw a football that has no air pressure? What does it matter? Why don't we let the quarterbacks do whatever they want to the football? I don't understand why there's any rules.
Science is not a game in which arbitrary rules are used to decide what explanations are to be permitted.
I make a distinction between manners and etiquette - manners as the principles, which are eternal and universal, etiquette as the particular rules which are arbitrary and different in different times, different situations, different cultures.
No matter what any of the grammar teachers say, punctuation is an arbitrary matter. It should be used to make sentences clear.
A written regulation in NASCAR is about as reliable as an Egyptian immigration law.
The problem is fundamental... It is as if a secret committee, now lost to history, has made a study of children and, having figured out what the greatest number were least disposed to declared that all of them should do it.
Those who sniff decay in every shift of sense or alteration of usage do the language no service. Too often for such people the notion of good English has less to do with expressing ideas clearly than with making words conform to some arbitrary pattern.
The custom and fashion of today will be the awkwardness and outrage of tomorrow - so arbitrary are these transient laws.
Extreme law is extreme injury. Summum jus, summa injuria.
I think many of the boundaries that convention has placed upon us are arbitrary, so we can fiddle with them if we fancy. Gravity's hard to dispute, and breathing, but a lot of things we instinctively obey are a lot of old tosh.
Who says that your thirties is when you're supposed to be done? I would like to know who made that rule!
Habit is altogether too arbitrary a master for me to submit to.
Why is it that we all - myself included - believe these stories? Why are we so quick to assume that the TSA is a bunch of jack-booted thugs, officious and arbitrary and drunk with power? It's because everything seems so arbitrary, because there's no accountability or transparency in the DHS.
We say, 'You may drink at the age of 21 but not at the age of 20.' Why? Because humans like to create terribly neat categories out of nature because it allows us a nice, tight social organization. The truth is, nature doesn't care that we like nice, neat social organizations. Nature likes variety.
Neither nature, experience, nor probability informs these lists of 'entitlements', which are subject to no constraints except those of the mind and appetite of their authors.
There are certain societal laws that are just accepted, things that are arbitrary. I think the fun thing about psychotics is that they question that. It can be very freeing... like, my ego or my individuality trumps society's law.
He refused categorically all ideas of fidelity or serious commitments. He explained that they were arbitrary and sterile. From anyone else such views would have shocked me, but I knew that in his case they did not exclude tenderness and devotion - feelings which came all the more easily to him since he was determined that they should be transient.
Sure! Why should any experts be the arbiters... That's like telling someone they can't be a vegetarian.
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.
I was terrible in English. I couldn't stand the subject. It seemed to me ridiculous to worry about whether you spelled something wrong or not, because English spelling is just a human convention - it has nothing to do with anything real, anything from nature.
The impulses of my heart are the voice of Nature, which is never mistaken. The institutions that stand in my way are man-made and are only arbitrary conventions to which I have never given my consent. In trampling these institutions underfoot, I shall have the double pleasure of satisfying my inclinations and of believing myself a hero
We lay it down as a fundamental, that laws, to be just, must give a reciprocation of right; that, without this, they are mere arbitrary rules of conduct, founded in force, and not in conscience.
There's an arbitrary idea that the horizontal edge in a frame has to be the point of reference.
And Nature takes no account of moral consequences, of arbitrary conditions which we create, and which we feel obliged to maintain at any cost.
