"Arbitrary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... say, "Music is (1) a number of sounds following each other in a natural, pleasing manner; (2) the science of harmonious sounds; and (3) the art of so combining them as to please the ear." These are, however, only brief, cold, and arbitrary definitions: music is far more than as thus defined. Indeed, to go no farther in the description of this really sublime manifestation of the beautiful would be to very inadequately express its manifold meanings, its helpful, delightful uses. And yet the ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... the battle to the strong.' I suppose no one will say that the bishops are the greatest men in the Church of England, or that every Chief Justice is a greater man than every puisne judge. Success is especially arbitrary in cases where it goes by pure patronage: in many such cases the patron would smile at your weakness if you fancied that the desire to find the best man ever entered his head. In the matter of the bench and bar, where tangible duties are to be performed, a patron is compelled to a ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... each other during this sacred little ceremony; their hearts were too full when they remembered afresh the absence of headstones, the lack of care, in the place where the three women lay who had ministered to their father, borne him children, and patiently endured his arbitrary and loveless rule. Even Cleve Flanders' grave,—the Edgewood shoemaker, who lay next,—even his resting-place was marked and, with a touch of some one's imagination marked by the old man's own lapstone twenty-five pounds in weight, a monument ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... less artificial and arbitrary, for the truth is that all of the three divisions are but ascending degrees of the great scale of Life, the lowest point of which is undifferentiated Matter, and the highest point that of Spirit. And, moreover, the different Planes shade into each other, so that no hard and fast division ...
— The Kybalion - A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece • Three Initiates
... power, was new in Scottish judicial proceedings, though now so frequently resorted to, it was exclaimed against by the lawyers on the opposite side of politics, as an interference with the civil judicature of the country, equally new, arbitrary, and tyrannical. And if it thus affected even strangers connected with them only by political party, it may be guessed what the Ashton family themselves said and thought under so gross a dispensation. Sir William, still more worldly-minded than he was timid, was reduced ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... And though his brother alone was there to hear him, he went on speaking. He expressed all his horror of the Collectivist State as imagined by Mege, a Dictator-State re-establishing ancient servitude on yet closer lines. The error of all the Socialist sects was their arbitrary organisation of Labour, which enslaved the individual for the profit of the community. And, forced to conciliate the two great currents, the rights of society and the rights of the individual, Guillaume had ended by placing his whole faith in free ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... walls which enclosed so many innocent victims of arbitrary power, have been made into a toy, to be offered to your Highness, as a token of the love of the people, and a lesson ...
— The Peasant and the Prince • Harriet Martineau
... purely English. During the years between 1629 and 1640, the period of arbitrary Stuart government, about twenty thousand Puritans emigrated to America, settling in the colonies of the far North. Although minor additions were made from time to time, the greater portion of the New England people sprang from this original stock. Virginia, too, for a long time drew nearly all ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... Birds, for instance, have no doubt a feeling, more or less clearly defined, which, if it were translated into human speech, might read, "Birds and nature." We, in our turn, say, "Man and nature." But such distinctions, useful as they are, and therefore admissible, are none the less arbitrary and liable to mislead. Birds and men are alike parts of nature, having many things in common not only with each other, but with every form of animate existence. The world is not a patchwork, though never so cunningly put together, but a garment ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... bitterest fight was with the stockholders of the United Water Company, for it was practically the whole of the gross earnings of this company that he voted to lend to himself and used to bolster up his wide battle front. Yet he never pushed his arbitrary rule too far. Compelling sacrifice from the men whose fortunes were tied up with his, nevertheless when any one of them was driven to the wall and was in dire need, Daylight was there to help him back into the line. Only a strong man could have saved so complicated ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... arbitrary proceedings, and being threatened by Carvajal with a similar treatment of all the other prisoners, and that the city should be given up to pillage if they did not execute the required commission without delay, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... sentinels from city to city, and happily reproducing in movement and phrase the great song-dialogue. Words and music together, the piece ranks with the foremost missionary lyrics. Like the greater Mason-Heber world-song, it has acquired no arbitrary name, appearing in Mason's own tune-books under its first hymn-line and likewise in many others. A few hymnals have named it "Bowring," (and why not?) and some later ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... hold them together. This was the knowledge that they were literally living on top of a bomb. If an Invader's flying ship descended at the villa, everything that happened would be heard and seen by microphones and concealed television cameras. If the Invaders were too arrogant, or if they were arbitrary, there would be a test to see if their ship could exist in the ...
— The Invaders • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... appearance of affection. No; there had been some letters between them, that was all. I have never been able to discover the actual cause of their parting. Geraldine refused to answer any questions, in a most arbitrary manner. It is a hard thing, Clarissa; for I know that she ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... of all that should adhere to the same glorious cause, and stand up for God against these workers of iniquity. And, as the foundation of that anti-christian and wicked hierarchy in the church, and of arbitrary power and absolute tyranny in the state, was laid in the blood of these two proto-martyrs for the covenant and cause of GOD, so they now (July, 1663,) proceeded to build it up with the blood of another noble and worthy patriot, the ...
— Act, Declaration, & Testimony for the Whole of our Covenanted Reformation, as Attained to, and Established in Britain and Ireland; Particularly Betwixt the Years 1638 and 1649, Inclusive • The Reformed Presbytery
... not abridge this right in any way by direct legislation. Its power to tax was however undoubted. The friends of the State bank system claimed that the indirect method of destroying the institution by taxing its notes out of existence was an arbitrary exercise ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... is correct. The speaker, in this verse, desires to illustrate the force of righteous conduct. Transcriber's note: There was no corresponding footnote reference in the text, so I have assigned this footnote to an arbitrary location ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... may unhesitatingly declare that, as far as the material condition of the vast bulk of mankind is concerned, the connection between conduct and consequences—to use Spencer's formula—exists only in the most ludicrous, arbitrary, and iniquitous fashion. Is there not some audacity in our imagining that our thoughts can possibly be just when the body of each one of us is steeped to the neck in injustice? And from this injustice no man is free, be it to his ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... as well as by Ben Jonson's satire upon Marston's neologisms; that it at the same time admitted foreign words to the rights of citizenship on easier terms than now is in good measure equally true. What was of greater import, no arbitrary line had been drawn between high words and low; vulgar then meant simply what was common; poetry had not been aliened from the people by the establishment of an Upper House of vocables, alone entitled to move in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... stated that Beethoven's music shows a deficiency in counterpoint. His originality, the wealth of his ideas, his versatility, will explain this. The fugue, while it is ingenious and interesting, is artificial and, indeed often arbitrary in musical composition, sometimes introduced merely to stop gaps or for brilliancy of effect. It is not surprising that Beethoven should have neglected it to some extent, although he has used it with excellent effect in some of the sonatas and in his two masses. His fertility of imagination ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... moment of momentum on which the tides can make draughts for application to the enlargement of the revolution. The proportions in which these two available sources can be drawn upon for contributions is not left arbitrary. The laws of dynamics provide the shares in which each of the bodies is to contribute for the joint purpose of ...
— Time and Tide - A Romance of the Moon • Robert S. (Robert Stawell) Ball
... the state's right to intervene in the management of private enterprise. In addition to the burdens imposed by high inflation and persistent trade deficits, businesses have been subject to pressure on the part of central and local governments, e.g., arbitrary changes in regulations, numerous rigorous inspections, retroactive application of new business regulations, and arrests of "disruptive" businessmen and factory owners. A wide range of redistributive policies has helped those at the bottom of the ladder. Close relations with Russia, possibly ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... slave-trade, the slave-dealers adopted certain arbitrary designations to denote from what portion of the coast their wares were obtained. For instance, slaves shipped from Sierra Leone and the rivers to the north and east of that peninsula, and who were principally Timmanees, Kossus, Acoos, Mendis, Foulahs, and Jolloffs, were called ...
— The History of the First West India Regiment • A. B. Ellis
... promulgating his views; he entered the Constituent and then the Legislative Assembly, as a member for the department of Landes, and spoke eloquently from the tribune. He was a constitutional "Mugwump": he cared for neither parties nor men, but for ideas. He was equally opposed to the domination of arbitrary power and to the tyranny of Socialism. He voted with the right against the left on extravagant Utopian schemes, and with the left against the right when he felt that the legitimate complaints of the poor and suffering ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... adaptation of the principle will be obvious, if we shall suppose, that a person who is acquainted with all the modern European languages, had been compelled to discriminate, and continue to remember, a distinct arbitrary mark or character for the many thousands of words contained in each. We may not be warranted, perhaps, to say that such a task would be impossible; but that it would be inconceivably burdensome can admit of no doubt. We have, indeed, in the writings ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... end of my journey I reached Ganhard, which was formerly one of the most prosperous towns in Central India, but is now much decayed and governed by a wealthy, arbitrary, violent, generous, and cruel prince. His name is Rajah Maddan, a true Oriental potentate, delicate and barbarous, affable and sanguinary, combining feminine ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... first, the greatest lasting'st Plague of Life, Husband; the Constant Jaylor of a wife, A proud insulting dominering thing, Abroad a subject, but at Home a King, There he in State does Arbitrary Reign, And lordlike pow'r do's o'er his wife maintain. For when she puts the Marriage Garments on, } The pleasures Ended e'er 'tis well begun: } But Plagues increase and hardly e're have done, } The joy he Courted he dispises now, And do's ...
— The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony: Responses From Women • Various
... fortunes of antiquity as minister? What must have been the court when such women as Messalina and Agrippina controlled its councils? The ascendency of women and sycophants is infinitely worse than the arbitrary rule of stern but experienced generals. The whole empire was ransacked for the private pleasure of the emperors, and those who surrounded them. "L'etat, c'est moi," was the motto of every emperor from Augustus to Theodosius. With such a spirit, so monopolizing ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... again. They will do nothing; there's no satisfaction to be had," he said. "I drove out my son by arbitrary harshness, and now the only reparation I might have ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... have no business with; not concern &c. 9; have no business there, have nothing to do with, intrude &c. 24. bring in head and shoulders, drag in head and shoulders, lug in head and shoulders. Adj. irrelative[obs3], irrespective, unrelated; arbitrary; independent, unallied; unconnected, disconnected; adrift, isolated, insular; extraneous, strange, alien, foreign, outlandish, exotic. not comparable, incommensurable, heterogeneous; unconformable &c. 83. irrelevant, inapplicable; not pertinent, not ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... The arbitrary power of the military caste of Germany which once could secretly and of its own single choice disturb the peace of the world is discredited and destroyed. And more than that—much more than that—has ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... future. But such proceedings call forth the spectre of bankruptcy, which puts an end to credit. What is to be done then? Why, then, the new Government takes a bold step; it unites all its forces in order to maintain itself; it smothers opinion, has recourse to arbitrary measures, ridicules its former maxims, declares that it is impossible to conduct the administration except at the risk of being unpopular; in short, it proclaims itself governmental. And it is here that other candidates for ...
— Essays on Political Economy • Frederic Bastiat
... would have been longer if needed. The governor vainly attempting to escape to the frigate was, with his creatures, compelled to seek protection by submission; through the streets where he had first displayed his scarlet coat and arbitrary commission, he and his fellows were marched to the town-house and thence to prison. All the cry was against Andros and Randolph. The castle was taken; the frigate ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... power of his nobles, by obliging them to observe the laws towards their inferiors, and setting them the salutary example in his own government, he was seduced to imitate their conduct, and to make his arbitrary will, or rather that of his ministers, the rule of his actions. Instead of accommodating himself, by a strict frugality, to the embarrassed situation in which his revenue had been left by the military expeditions of his uncle, the dissipations of his father, and the usurpations of the barons; ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... these companies had been engaged in a fierce and disastrous competition, which cut into each other's profits and cheapened the market price of stones. He had suggested a scheme of amalgamation which would put all the mines under one management, and fix arbitrary prices for diamonds which henceforth could not be sold under a certain figure agreed upon by the Syndicate. This plan, which had the general approval of the mining companies, practically gave Kenneth Traynor control of the diamond industry ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... invidious one. Three authors hereinafter studied are examples: Meredith, Hardy and Stevenson. Hardy alone is now in the land of the living, Meredith having but just passed away. Yet to omit the former, while including the other two, is obviously arbitrary, since his work in fiction is as truly done as if he, like them, rested from his literary labors and the gravestone chronicled his day of death. For reasons best known to himself, Mr. Hardy seems ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... Many years ago, when comparing, and seeing others compare, the birds from the separate islands of the Galapagos Archipelago, both one with another, and with those from the American mainland, I was much struck how entirely vague and arbitrary is the distinction between species and varieties. On the islets of the little Madeira group there are many insects which are characterized as varieties in Mr. Wollaston's admirable work, but which it cannot {49} be doubted would be ranked as distinct species by many entomologists. Even Ireland ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... soul to the brain. A true Jesuit must have no nature of his own and no individuality. He is simply a machine, with likes and dislikes, conscience and soul subject to the will of his superior, whose mind is also under the same arbitrary control; and so on to the top. If at the head there were God, it would be well; but man is there, and consequently the whole society is a gigantic mistake. To be a sincere member of it, a man must be a half-witted fool, a religious fanatic, or a rogue for whom ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... positions, no arbitrary characters, and the vowels are written in their natural order without lifting the pencil; as in longhand, ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... on the rack until I could find or invent a better reason I should perhaps say it was because he was so infernally cock-sure, so convinced that he and he alone had the power of distinguishing between the true and false; also that he was so arbitrary and arrogant and ready to trample on those who ...
— Dead Man's Plack and an Old Thorn • William Henry Hudson
... Abrupt, arbitrary, disconnected creative acts may serve to illustrate the Divine power; but that continuous unbroken chain of organisms which extends from palaeozoic formations to the formations of recent times, a chain in which each link hangs on a preceding and sustains a succeeding one, demonstrates to us ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... bind the artist by determinate rules, it is in order to free him from routine, to recall him to the general law of being and of his own individuality. It is in order that he may study himself, in the place of submitting to arbitrary prescriptions. In such study every marked personality will find ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... Kryltzoff began, flushing all over. "We say that we are against arbitrary rule and despotism, and is this not the ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... drawn with a little skill, and finished in lively colours, would certainly be more attractive than the dry discussions which I have tacked on to the developmental history of these animals. But the mode of weaving in the loose threads would still in many cases be arbitrary, and to be effected with equal justice in various ways; and many gaps would still have to be filled up by means of more or less bold assumptions. Those who have not wandered much in this region of research would then readily believe that they were standing upon firm ground, where ...
— Facts and Arguments for Darwin • Fritz Muller
... these tendencies as good omens, however, felicitating myself with the thought that while her Quaker antecedents would always give to her manner and garb a beautiful simplicity, they would not trammel her taste with arbitrary custom. Though now more clearly satisfied that the beauty of her full face by no means equalled that of her profile, I was still far more than content with a perfection of features that ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... possessed a safe criterion by which to assess the value of the commissions' conclusions, he must needs himself decide the matter arbitrarily. And the delegates, having no such criterion, pronounced very arbitrary judgments on momentous issues. One instance of this turned upon Poland's claims to certain territories incorporated in Germany, which were referred to a special commission under the presidency of M. Cambon. Commissioners were sent to the country ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... a disapproving murmur from the judges, as with one voice, rejected his pretensions, and at a proposal of the Kadi it was resolved that the young man should be protected against any arbitrary attack on the part of the Vekeel by a double guard; for many grave accusations against Obada were already on their way to Medina. The negro quitted the court, mad with rage, and concocting fresh indictments against Paula ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... to the encouragement and protection of Leo X. and Francis I; the one as absolute a pope, and the other as despotic a prince, as ever reigned. Do not mistake, and imagine that while I am only exposing a prejudice, I am speaking in favor of arbitrary power; which from my soul I abhor, and look upon as a gross and criminal violation of the natural rights ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... in point of fact, it was the exercise of a fresh act of authority, a repetition of the arbitrary act, if, indeed, it is to be considered as such. He took hold of his pen slowly, and evidently in no very good temper; and then he wrote, 'Order for M. le Chevalier d'Artagnan, captain of my musketeers, ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... change proposed is simply a reduction of the qualification, so that the rural labourer, whose class is probably the largest, as it is the poorest, in the country,—is still disfranchised, and will remain so, unless it be his chance to live within the arbitrary line of some so-called borough. For these boroughs, you must know, are sometimes strictly confined to the aggregations of houses which constitute the town, but sometimes stretch out their arms so as to include rural ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... said I, "that your ideas of retribution are too sanguine, and too arbitrary for the laws of this country. I dispute not that your motives are great and high; but have you debated the consequences, and ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... punishments, allowing the slaves to testify in court in cases to which whites were parties, providing for their religious instruction, appointing guardians of their scanty rights, giving them one week day for themselves, and restricting arbitrary sales of slaves. Not one of the colonies would agree to a single one of these measures. That peculiar obstinacy which slaveholding dominion seems to engender, made them, as with us, bent on having all or nothing. All hopes of instituting a gradual preparation for freedom being ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... contradict it; they would rather have denied life. They had no psychology, no understanding of Nature, or of the hidden forces, the roots of humanity, the "Spirit of the Earth." They fashioned a scheme of life and nature that were childish, silly, arbitrary figments. Some of them were cultured and practical people who had seen and read much. But they never saw or read anything as it actually was: they always reduced it to an abstraction. They were poor-blooded: they had high moral ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... says: "Beyond the range of human reason there is neither Space nor Time; they are arbitrary conceptions of man, at which he has arrived by the comparison and arrangement of different impressions which he has received from the outside world. The conception of Space arises from the sequence of the various forms which fill Space, by which ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... Hanover, as elector of Hanover, is an arbitrary prince; his electoral army is the instrument of that power; as king of Great Britain he is a restrained monarch. And though I don't suspect his majesty, and I dare say the hearts of the British soldiery are as yet free and untainted, yet I fear that too long an intercourse ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 11. - Parlimentary Debates II. • Samuel Johnson
... thought of going to New York, as the nearest place where there was a printer; and I was rather inclined to leave Boston when I reflected that I had already made myself a little obnoxious to the governing party, and, from the arbitrary proceedings of the Assembly in my brother's case, it was likely I might, if I stayed, soon bring myself into scrapes; and farther, that my indiscrete disputations about religion began to make me pointed at with horror by good people as an ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... his to Miss Gallatin. Here occurred a touch of character that is worthy to be mentioned, as showing of how very little account an American, male or female, is in the estimation of a European, and how very arbitrary are the laws of etiquette among our English cousins. Mr. Canning actually gave way to his son-in-law, leaving the oldest of the two ladies to come after the youngest, because, as a marquis, his son-in-law took precedence of a commoner! This was out of place in America, at least, ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... and accepted by them as sufficient. In the latter case the townsfolk were collectively responsible for the amount. The Great Charter, as stated above, extended specially to London the limitation on baronial "aids,'' but left untouched its liability to tallage, a lower and more arbitrary form of taxation, which the towns shared with the crown's demesne manors, and which London . resisted in vain. The two exactions, although distinct, have to be studied together, and when in 1296-1297 Edward I. was forced to his great surrender, he was formerly ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... symbol of the cross may be briefly considered. Why should a form so simple and so familiar have acquired an astonishingly wide range and be generally regarded as symbolic of life? Much has to be learnt before the problem is solved. One thing seems fairly certain—the choice has not been wholly arbitrary; there has been at work an intuitional, subconscious factor. Is it possible that the negativing of a line in one direction by a line in another direction raises subliminally a sense of strain, then of effort, then ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... which was not necessarily a sin at all, exacted from him that hypocrisy which is the tribute that vice pays to virtue! Very different was the conduct of the Rev. Mr. Worden. Taught to discriminate better, and unaccustomed to set up arbitrary rules of his own as the law of God, this loose observer of his professional obligations is other matters, made a very proper distinction in this. Instead of giving the least manifestation of confusion or alarm, the log on which ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... noted the fact that in a basin of water the direction of the whirling is what we may term accidental—that is, dependent on conditions so slight that they elude our observation—but in hurricanes a certain fact determines in an arbitrary way the direction in which the spin shall take place. As soon as such a movement of the air attains any considerable diameter, although in its beginning it may have spun in a direction brought about by local accidents, ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... Proprietary of Ireland find in the country no tribunal by which they are to be judged; a fact which gives them the full possession of unlimited authority; and we all know that the absence of responsibility is a great incentive to crime. No man in a free country should be invested with arbitrary power; and yet, it is undeniable that an Irish landlord can exercise ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... so distinguish vegetable-eaters, wherever a fair comparison is instituted. They possess a suppleness like that of youth, even long after what is called the juvenile period of life is passed over. They are often seen running and jumping, unless restrained by the arbitrary customs of society, in very advanced age. Their wounds heal with astonishing rapidity in as many days as weeks, or even months, in the latter case. All this could not happen, were there not a good state of the ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... Here they were in a district where many large homes pooled their lawns in block-long stretches of soft green. The street lights cast arbitrary patches of brightness against the houses, but their windows were blank and dark. This street, like most in this small town, was lined with trees on either side. There were the fragrances of ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... under Captain Cook; commanded the Bounty at Tahiti, when his crew mutinied under his harsh treatment, and set him adrift, with 18 others, in an open boat, in which, after incredible privations, he arrived in England; was afterwards governor of N.S. Wales, but dismissed for his rigorous and arbitrary conduct (1753-1817). ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... the Press-gang was actually brought home to an old Roystonian, who, while crossing London Bridge, was seized and made to serve his seven years! Though the regular mode of enlistment had less of this arbitrary character it was, nevertheless, often very burdensome in our rural districts and led to some curious expedients for meeting its demands. The Chief Constable of the hundred served a notice upon the Overseers, and sometimes the number required was not one for ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... fiction could imagine. That is true, but it is true also that the sex which reads the most novels reads the fewest newspapers; and, besides, the reporter does not command the novelist's skill to fix impressions in a young girl's mind or to suggest conjecture. The magazine is a little despotic, a little arbitrary; but unquestionably its favor is essential to success, and its conditions are not such narrow ones. You cannot deal with Tolstoy's and Flaubert's subjects in the absolute artistic freedom of Tolstoy and Flaubert; since De Foe, that is unknown among us; but if you deal with them in the manner ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... need of implicit obedience. If the church were a simple organization of man, if it were for the accomplishment of worldly ends, if its object were the aggrandizement of individuals, nothing could be more dangerous than the establishment in it of what seems like arbitrary power. As it is directed from above; as its aim is nothing less than the spiritual uplifting of the race; as, indeed, upon it rests the salvation, under God, of mankind, the case is different. It is necessary that no energy be lost; that all the power of the ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... Patriots, through the press, show their appreciation of the danger of an outbreak, and yet their determination to meet their whole duty. They endeavored to restrain the rash among the Sons of Liberty within the safe precincts of the law; yet, repelling all thought of submission to arbitrary power, they strove to lift up the general mind to the high plane of action which a true patriotism demanded, and prepare it, if need were, for the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... Burgh, demanding that the abbot should give unto one of his favourites a certain yearly sum, or a number of lands equal to that sum, and the abbot refused to do so without the consent of the king who was patron of the monastery; and going to Rome to know the cause of such an arbitrary demand, he was reproved by the Pope in person, and treated with great indignity by the cardinals, and expelled the court. The abbot was so much grieved, by this cruel and ungenerous treatment that he never recovered, but died in the same ...
— The New Guide to Peterborough Cathedral • George S. Phillips
... of the harmonic tone-complex, we look for the chief melody; and here it will be found,—excepting when arbitrary emphasis (by accentuation) is imparted to some lower tone-line, so that it, for the time being, assumes a prominence equal, or superior, to that of the uppermost line. (This divided prominence is seen in the ...
— Lessons in Music Form - A Manual of Analysis of All the Structural Factors and - Designs Employed in Musical Composition • Percy Goetschius
... passages of Sacred Scripture predestination to eternal happiness is represented as a work of pure mercy, nay, even as an arbitrary act of God. Take, e.g., Matth. XXIV, 22 sqq.: "And unless those days had been shortened, no flesh should be saved: but for the sake of the elect those days shall be shortened.... For there shall arise false Christs and false prophets, and shall show great signs and wonders, insomuch ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... ... the highest power of the soul." Thus preached Channing. Who knows but this pulpit aroused the younger Emerson to the possibilities of intuitive reasoning in spiritual realms? The influence of men like Channing in his fight for the dignity of human nature, against the arbitrary revelations that Calvinism had strapped on the church, and for the belief in the divine in human reason, doubtless encouraged Emerson in his unshackled search for the infinite, and gave him premises which he later took for granted instead of carrying ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... remained in the possession of the Portuguese until 1622. Albuquerque's great career had a painful and ignominious close. He had several enemies at the Portuguese court who lost no opportunity of stirring up the jealousy of the king against him, and his own injudicious and arbitrary conduct on several occasions served their end only too well. On his return from Ormuz, at the entrance of the harbour of Goa, he met a vessel from Europe bearing despatches announcing that he was superseded ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... busy myself with that tiresome America, and am I not, even yet, daily insulted because, after publishing thirty-two volumes of the great edition in folio and in quarto, and twelve hundred plates, one volume of the historical section is wanting? We men of letters are the servants of an arbitrary master, whom we have imprudently chosen, who flatters and pets us first, and then tyrannizes over us if we do not work to his liking. You see, my dear friend, I play the grumbling old man, and, at the risk ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... father was talking to the Marquis de Laurebourg, an old lady, who was doubtless the Marchioness, had said, "Poor boy! he was so early deprived of a mother's care!" What did that mean unless it was a reflection upon the arbitrary behavior of his father? Norbert saw that these people always had their children with them, and the sight of this filled him with jealousy, and brought tears of anguish to his eyes. Sometimes, as he trudged wearily behind his yoke of ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... country, which marked the period from 1876 to the eighties. It was his influence, largely, which led to the war upon the "crookedness" which marked the early years of professional base ball history, in which pool gambling was the potent factor. It took years of cohesive and even arbitrary legislation to eliminate the poison of the pool rooms from the professional system, but success was finally achieved, and to the late President Hulbert and his able coadjutors in the League does the credit of this success ...
— Spalding's Baseball Guide and Official League Book for 1895 • Edited by Henry Chadwick
... letter for some time, re-reading chosen passages as he walked about the room, and considering he scarce knew what. There are ideas language is too gross for, and shape too arbitrary, which come to us and have a definite influence upon us, and yet we cannot fasten on the filmy things and make them visible and distinct to ourselves, much less to others. Why did he twice throw a look into the glass in the act of passing it? He stood for a moment with head erect facing it. His eyes ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... arbitrary suspensions which occur only in the index of addresses preceding each book, suspensions which would never occur in the body of the text, as: ...
— A Sixth-Century Fragment of the Letters of Pliny the Younger • Elias Avery Lowe and Edward Kennard Rand
... the belief in fixed Law, versus arbitrary will, modifies the Hjs opinions concerning the pursuit of happiness. Mankind, das rastlose Ursachenthier, is born to be on the whole equally happy and miserable. The highest organisms, the fine porcelain of ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... participated—and such is the case, for even granting that translation be a fact, these souls existed in Adam only potentially, as unconscious, undeveloped germs, when the sin took place—their punishment is none the less arbitrary and revolting. Saint Augustine believed he was justifying Providence; he succeeded only in deceiving his own reason and revolted sense of justice, but he preferred by suggestion to deceive himself to such an extent as to believe in the ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... convincing in modern times. In the space of three minutes, Nora, who has been her husband's sensual toy, and has taken pleasure in being that, and only that, leaves her husband and her children, as has been said, for school-books. A more arbitrary piece of stage craft was never devised; but it was not the stage craft the critics were accustomed to, and the admirers of Ibsen did not dare to admit that he had devised Nora to cry aloud that a woman is more than a domestic animal. It would have been fatal for an apostle ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... though exquisite young friends, is there no better way of rallying round the Prophet than THIS? I have heard, from characters in ancient literature, such as Agamemnon—than whom a more energetic soldier, though perhaps a trifle arbitrary—the Prophet HAVE heard, I say, that a deal of liquor used to be poured on the graves of coves like him and me, and that it did them good. This may be the case, and anyway the experiment is well worth trying; though, ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... circumstance, Which often breeds affection or disdain, Yet lighting but the surface of the man, Shows not his heart. I know not what you think, And care not for your favour or your love, Save as desert may crown me. Your decree, "Red shall not marry white," is arbitrary, And off the base of nature; for if they Should marry not, then neither should they love. Yet Iena loves me, and I love her. Be merciful! I ask not Iena To leave her race; I rather would engage These willing arms in ...
— Tecumseh: A Drama • Charles Mair
... Literary Supplement (August 18, 1921), that credibility varies as to classes of witnesses and classes of events, and also as to type of perception. Thus, perceptions of touch, odor, and taste have low evidential value. Our hearing is defective and arbitrary when it judges the source and direction of sound, and in listening to the talk of other people "words which are not heard will be supplied by the witness in all good faith. He will have a theory of the purport of ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... severity of the law in execution. You will wonder at this sentence out of my mouth,(560) but not when you have heard my reason. The liberty of the press has been so much abused, that almost all men, especially such as have weight, I mean, grave hypocrites and men of arbitrary principles, are ready to demand a restraint. I would therefore show, that the law, as it already stands, is efficacious enough to repress enormities. I hope so, particularly in Monsieur de Guerchy's case, or I do not see how a foreign minister can come hither; if, while their persons ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... a greater evil is to be made perpetual. If the guaranties of the Constitution can be broken provisionally to serve a temporary purpose, and in a part only of the country, we can destroy them everywhere and for all time. Arbitrary measures often change, but they generally change for the worse. It is the curse of despotism that it has no halting place. The intermitted exercise of its power brings no sense of security to its subjects, for they can never know what more they will be called to endure when its red right ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Johnson • Andrew Johnson
... the first issue of the Toronto Globe, its motto taken from one of the boldest letters of Junius to George III: "The subject who is truly loyal to the chief magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures." The leading article was a long and careful review of the history of the country, followed by a eulogy on the constitution enjoyed by Great Britain since "the glorious revolution of 1688," but denied to Canada. Responsible government was withheld; the governor named his ...
— George Brown • John Lewis
... slavery is per se wrong, where the enslaver has no direct warrant from heaven, or the enslaved has not forfeited liberty by crime on principles of recognized and universal equity; and the whole Bible forbidding wrong must be held as forbidding slavery, or any arbitrary and inhuman tamperings with the inalienable rights ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... ordinary vulgar motives. It must also be remembered that fifty years ago, the female art student had no recognized existence. She was shut out from that modicum of freedom and of practical advantages it were arbitrary to deny, and which may now be enjoyed by any earnest art aspirant in almost any great city. However unjustifiable the proceeding resorted to for a time by George Sand and Rosa Bonheur may be held to be, it cannot possibly be said they had no motive ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... a policy of his own—in fact, a double policy, one devoted to dealing with the land and its people; one to dealing with his enemies or those who questioned his authority. The one was as arbitrary, the other as cruel, as that of the ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... which he himself assigns a limit to the complete absorption of all wills by his own; he does not admit, of course in his own interest, that the public power, at least in the civil order of things and in common practice, should be illimitable nor, especially, arbitrary.[2324]—This is due to his not being an utopian or a theorist, like his predecessors of the Convention, but a perspicacious statesman, who is in the habit of using his own eyes. He sees things directly, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... of birds. This, which is preserved in the Palatium, was lost when the city was taken by the Gauls; but afterwards, when the barbarians had been repulsed, it was found unharmed in a deep bed of ashes, where everything else had been burned or spoiled. He also enacted some laws, the most arbitrary of which is that a wife cannot obtain a divorce from her husband, but that a husband may put away his wife for poisoning her children, counterfeiting keys, or adultery. If any one put away his wife on other grounds than these, he enacted that half his property ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... soothing. He embraced me with warmth, and even wept over me. He could not refrain from imprecations upon the memory of my father, and he declared with energy, that the son of Leonora della Colonna should never suffer from the arbitrary and capricious tyranny of a Sicilian count. He assured me in the strongest terms that his whole fortune was at my disposal. Then telling me that his dear and only child had been impatient for my arrival, he took me by the hand, and led me to ...
— Italian Letters, Vols. I and II • William Godwin
... man respects the rights even of brute matter and arbitrary symbols. If he writes the same word twice in succession, by accident, he always erases the one that stands second; has not the first-comer the prior right? This act of abstract justice, which I trust many of my readers, like myself, have often performed, is a curious anti-illustration, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... him,—looked away, his face darkening. "Sir," he said, "I have thrust away all arbitrary ties of family. The true life,"—his eye dilating, as if some great thought had come into his brain,—"the true life is one where no marriage exists,—where the soul acknowledges only the pure impersonal love ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... whole surface of the work, unless the lines of the pattern require you to depart from this rule; as, for instance, in certain parts of fig. 864, where you will notice stitches, carried over 7 or 8 threads; also in the borders, fig. 865 and 866, where the stitches are arranged in a rather arbitrary manner, in order to bring out the pattern ...
— Encyclopedia of Needlework • Therese de Dillmont
... that the series of objects named in this Song has not been more frequently chosen for decorative purposes on roofs, walls, or windows of ecclesiastical buildings, where a long series would be appropriate. Perhaps the length of the series, and the difficulty of making any but an arbitrary selection, has something to do with the rarity ...
— The Three Additions to Daniel, A Study • William Heaford Daubney
... again; To stick the doctor's chair into the throne, Give law to words, or war with words alone, Senates and courts with Greek and Latin rule, And turn the council to a grammar school! 180 For sure, if Dulness sees a grateful day, 'Tis in the shade of arbitrary sway. Oh! if my sons may learn one earthly thing, Teach but that one, sufficient for a king; That which my priests, and mine alone, maintain, Which as it dies or lives, we fall or reign: May you, may Cam and Isis, preach it long! "The right divine ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... to fancy that we are not an isolated power to which the remainder of the world serves as a pedestal, that one is not a licensed destroyer, a poor, fragile tyrant, whom arbitrary decrees protect, but a necessary note of an infinite harmony? To fancy that the law of life is the same in the immensity of space and irradiates worlds as it irradiates cities and as it irradiates ant-hills. To fancy that each vibration ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... practice of inversion, or apparent inversion, are two other phenomena: the deliberate violation of normal word-accent to fit the metrical stress,[96] and an analogous violation of phrasal stress. The former is not such an entirely arbitrary procedure as it might at first seem; for at one period in the history of the language the accent of many words (especially those of French origin) was uncertain. Chaucer could say, without forcing, either nAiture, ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... July 12; at our Antipodes it is, of course, 11 a.m.: but is it 11 a.m. on Tuesday, July 12, or on Wednesday, July 13? And whichever it is, what is the reason for its being so? for it seems to me that the solution of the question must be perfectly arbitrary. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 196, July 30, 1853 • Various
... in which defiance and stubbornness appear. The severest test which could be imposed upon adults would be a constant and apparently arbitrary thwarting of their desires. Is it to be wondered at that a little, unreasoning life which hears "don't" by the scores of times from morning till night, grows rebellious, ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... with his sisters "whiles," she acknowledged in secret; he was arbitrary with his little brothers when they neglected tasks of his giving; and tried his mother and his grandmother, now and then, as young lads always have, and always will try their mothers and grandmothers, until old heads can be ...
— David Fleming's Forgiveness • Margaret Murray Robertson
... one who is impelled. Just as in love there is a beloved and a lover: The man is supposed to be the lover, the woman the beloved. Now, in the urge of power, it is the reverse. The woman must submit, but deeply, deeply submit. Not to any foolish fixed authority, not to any foolish and arbitrary will. But to something deep, deeper. To the soul in its dark motion of power and pride. We must reverse the poles. The woman must now submit—but deeply, deeply, and richly! No subservience. None of that. No slavery. A deep, unfathomable ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... correspondents of newspapers, under the character of the various spiritual tribunals of Eastern Christians inflicting fines, torture, and imprisonment on refractory or heretic members of those churches. The Jewish synods of Africa and the East exercise the same arbitrary powers, under the sanction of the supreme Mahometan authorities. Lately, however, the European ambassadors have done something to check these abuses in the dominions ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... 1834 his Esthetic Campaigns to Young Germany. This term has since then served friend and foe to designate the group of writers of whom we speak. Their slogan was freedom. Freedom from cramping police surveillance; freedom from the arbitrary control of government, unchecked by responsibility to the people; freedom from the narrowing prescriptions of ecclesiastical authority, backed by the power of the state; freedom from the literary restraint of medievalism in modern letters—these and various other brands ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... tracts, aggregating 2,520 acres, and averaging nearly 60 acres each, the most distant being less than a mile from the village green. This division is arbitrary; in practice, the more industrious members of the community would buy land from their less industrious neighbors, and the size and arrangement of the farms would vary. Often, too, the division would be into farms averaging more than sixty acres. In such cases ...
— Village Improvements and Farm Villages • George E. Waring
... law. For two centuries men had gradually become accustomed to the thought of an external nature governed by an unbreakable chain of cause and effect, but it was still believed that man, with his free will, was an exception and that history, therefore, consisting of the sum total of humanity's arbitrary actions, was incalculable and in large part inexplicable. But the more closely men studied the past, and the more widely and deeply did the uniformity of nature soak into their consciousness, the more "natural" did the progress ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... led astray by the wanton freaks Nature plays, and becomes sceptical as regards the truth of a natural system, though there is one to be discovered; and at last disgusted with the stiff and arbitrary systems of our books,—a disgust we confess most wholesome, if it only leads him into a closer communion with nature. The sooner one leaves those maternal apron-strings,—books,—and learns to identify himself with nature, and thus goes out of himself to affiliate with the spirit of the ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... arduous post, it alternately rose and fell in estimation, according to the talents of the individual who happened to fill the chair.[174] And hence the frequent alterations which took place in its philosophical tenets; which, depending rather on the arbitrary determinations of its present head, than on the tradition of settled maxims, were accommodated to the views of each successive master, according as he hoped by sophistry or concession to overcome the repugnance which the mind ever will feel to the ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... tulip that hurts its beauty."[21] The progress of civilization, with the self-control it involves, has made it possible to accept this suggestion seriously.[22] The difference is that whereas the flowers of our gardens are bettered only by the control of an arbitrary external will and intelligence, our human flowers may be bettered by an intelligence and will, a finer sense of responsibility, developed within themselves. Thus it is that human culture ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... each article should be produced, transported, exchanged and consumed? Ah! although there is much suffering within your walls; although misery, despair, and perhaps starvation, may call forth more tears than your warmest charity can wipe away, it is probable, it is certain, that the arbitrary intervention of government would infinitely multiply these sufferings, and would extend among you the evils which now reach but a small number of ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... liberty to make room for a friend upon my seat; for my fellow-travellers are not likely to approve of the inconvenience thereby occasioned, and they may protest that the legs and elbows of the sharer of my seat crowd them too much, and that the air-space calculated for one pair of lungs is by my arbitrary action shared by two pair. Just so my house-neighbours are not likely to approve of having my walls and roof too near to theirs, and will resent the arbitrary act by which I fill the air-space of the town with more ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... reported to have said at the Ulster Appeal Meeting in St. James's Hall, last Wednesday, "If they (the Ulster Irishmen) had to choose between arbitrary oppression and an appeal for justice to the God of battles, he (Dr. KANE) had no more doubt than he had about his existence, that that appeal would be made, and that God would defend the right." With the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, July 2, 1892 • Various
... which belonged to all humankind, as in Rheims, and Louvain; the Lusitania horror, the strewing of mines broadcast, the use of poisonous gases causing death by torture or incurable disease; the taking of hostages; the arbitrary imposition of monetary indemnities and penalties, and so forth. It is these facts that the non-combatant nations charge against Germany, and quite apart from the responsibility for the war, it is ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn
... to think of man's arbitrary distinction between that which has life and that which has not. Here, quite apart from such recognisable sounds as the scampering of mice, the falling of plaster behind his panelling, and the popping of purses or coffins from his fire, was a whole house talking to him had he but known its ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... consideration a bill for the reform of our system of banking and currency, for which the country waits with impatience, as for something fundamental to its whole business life and necessary to set credit free from arbitrary and artificial restraints. I need not say how earnestly I hope for its early enactment into law. I take leave to beg that the whole energy and attention of the Senate be concentrated upon it till the matter is successfully ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Woodrow Wilson • Woodrow Wilson
... emotional, toward nature and fellow men, philosophy may even be defined as the general theory of education. Unless a philosophy is to remain symbolic—or verbal—or a sentimental indulgence for a few, or else mere arbitrary dogma, its auditing of past experience and its program of values must take effect in conduct. Public agitation, propaganda, legislative and administrative action are effective in producing the change of disposition which a philosophy indicates as desirable, but only in the degree in ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... firmament; he is a powerful divinity who appears in human shape." He reflected with some satisfaction that the scriptures had made him absolute, had left the lives and properties of all his subjects to his arbitrary will, had pronounced him to be an incarnate deity, and had threatened to punish with death even ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... his genius; or rather, that my notion of the character of the man was formed first, and was then applied to his works, and identified with them. The main features of his character were, in my apprehension, fearlessness, kindliness, a decision that sometimes made him seem somewhat arbitrary, and condensation or concentration. He was wonderfully self-reliant. These moral qualities, guiding an artistic temperament as exquisite as was ever bestowed on man, made him what he was, the greatest inventor of abstract beauty, both in form and colour, ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... loyalty than even the judge. The reasons are obvious. In the first place, the number of criminals, or even of civil litigants, in any society is limited; whereas practically the whole population consists of taxpayers. In the second place, the arbitrary methods of administering justice practised by Oriental rulers do not shock their subjects nearly so much as Europeans are often disposed to think. Custom has made it in them a property of easiness. They often, indeed, fail to appreciate the intentions, and are disposed ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... the constitutional party and overthrew Redmond's power. We had incurred the very great odium of accepting even temporary partition—and a partition which, owing to this arbitrary extension of area, could not be justified on any ground of principle; we had involved with us many men who voted for that acceptance on the faith of Redmond's assurance that the Government were bound by their written word; and ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... Gentlemen will admit to their parlors men about whom they know facts which if true of a woman would close every respectable door against her, and God frowns on the Christian (?) society that makes such arbitrary and unjust distinctions. Cast both out, till they bring forth fruits ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... less honorable name of Melchites, or Royalists; [109] of men, whose faith, instead of resting on the basis of Scripture, reason, or tradition, had been established, and was still maintained, by the arbitrary power of a temporal monarch. Their adversaries might allege the words of the fathers of Constantinople, who profess themselves the slaves of the king; and they might relate, with malicious joy, how the decrees of Chalcedon had been inspired and reformed ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... living. I doubt, in the first place, whether they would be even aware of their privilege; secondly, every Golden Age grows fairer when viewed from a distance. Besides, and as a general consideration, it strikes me that a vast deal of mischief is involved in these arbitrary divisions of literature into golden or other epochs; they incite men to admire some mediocre writers and to disparage others, they pervert our natural taste, and their ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... backed up by the Government in most arbitrary action on behalf of the French and against the colonists, the theory continued to be that the French pretensions were disputed by us. At the end of 1889 the Home Government sent for the Prime Minister of Newfoundland, who came to England in 1890. A ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead
... this in opposition to Mrs. Bellmont's wishes, would be like encountering a whirlwind charged with fire, daggers and spikes. She was not as susceptible of fine emotions as her spouse. Mag's opinion of her was not without founda- tion. She was self-willed, haughty, undisciplined, arbitrary and severe. In common parlance, she was a SCOLD, a thorough one. Mr. B. remained silent during the consultation which follows, engaged in by mother, Mary and John, or Jack, as he ...
— Our Nig • Harriet E. Wilson
... says something like this in his wonderful book, Germany and Democracy: 'For what would happen if we Germans emerged victorious from this war? Our victory would only mean a strengthening of the dynastic principle of arbitrary power all along the line. Those of us who bewail the political backwardness of our Fatherland must realize that a German victory would prolong this backward condition for centuries. And not only Germany, but the whole of Europe, would have ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... branch of physical science has more been learnt of the SCIENTIA SCIENTIARUM, the priceless art of learning; no branch of science has more utterly confounded a wisdom of the wise, shattered to pieces systems and theories, and the idolatry of arbitrary names, and taught man to be silent while his Maker speaks, than this apparent pedantry of zoophytology, in which our old distinctions of "animal," "vegetable," and "mineral" are trembling in the balance, seemingly ready to vanish like their fellows - "the four elements" ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... his strength, may direct me to perform or to refrain from a particular action; indicating a certain arbitrary penalty in the event of disobedience within power to inflict. My action, if modified by his menaces, can no degree participate in virtue. He has afforded me no criterion as to what is right or wrong. A king, or an assembly of men, may publish a proclamation ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... and difficult. The Senate desires impartiality, equable temper, and knowledge of parliamentary law from its presiding officer. But it will not submit to any attempt on the part of the presiding officer to direct or advise it, and will instantly resent any arbitrary ruling. Of course, Mr. Roosevelt presided only at a few meetings before the final adjournment. When Congress met again he was ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... of the many, on liberty and slavery, power and the abuse of it, peace and war, are here very ably handled, with the spirit of a poet and the acuteness of a philosopher. Shakespeare himself seems to have had a leaning to the arbitrary side of the question, perhaps from some feeling of contempt for his own origin; and to have spared no occasion of baiting the rabble. What he says of them is very true: what he says of their betters is also very ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... government is very oppressive. Mining laws are very arbitrary and strictly enforced. A person wishing to prospect for gold must first procure a miner's license, paying ten dollars for it. If anything is discovered, and he wishes to locate a claim, he visits the recorder's office, states his business, and is told to call again. In the meantime, men are sent ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... and whereas the women of the United States are governed without their own consent, are denied trial by a jury of their peers, are taxed without representation, and are subject to manifold wrongs resulting from unjust and arbitrary exercise of power over an unrepresented class; and whereas in this centennial year of the republic the spirit of 1776 is breathing its influence upon the people, melting away prejudices and animosities and infusing into our national ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... blunt and unvarnished defence than a truckling and time-serving judge might do. And, indeed, in a time when justice is, in all its branches, so completely corrupted, I would rather lose my life by open military violence, than be conjured out of it by the hocus-pocus of some arbitrary lawyer, who lends the knowledge he has of the statutes made for our protection, to wrest them to ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... ruled and dominated, even in their own internal affairs, by arbitrary and irresponsible force or by their own will ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... the danseuse, about whom the duel was fought, as La Casacci, while Casanova refers to her as La Catai. In this manuscript Casanova always refers to her as La Casacci; La Catai is evidently one of M. Laforgue's arbitrary alterations of ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... "little rift within the lute" of his creed, "that by and by will make the music mute, and, ever widening, slowly silence all." For in religion as in love, "Unfaith in aught is want of faith in all." The Rev. Howard Malcolm's arbitrary proceeding had prevented the organization of an anti-slavery committee. But this was affected at a second meeting of the friends of the slave. Garrison was one of the twenty gentlemen who were appointed such a committee. His zeal and ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... not so sure that you can manage it," said Miramon, "for, while the ascent of Vraidex is incommoded by serpents, the quitting of Vraidex is very apt to be hindered by death and fate. For I must tell you I have a rather arbitrary half-brother, who is one of those dreadful Realists, without a scrap of aesthetic feeling, and ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... thing's certain. Camera men, Conqueror If only they'd existed then, 1066-1087 Would have journeyed many a mile To 'snap' King William's happy smile. They made him King and schoolbooks say He ruled with arbitrary sway; Demanding with sharp battle axes Instant payment of big taxes. Curfew And p'raps it's just as well to tell He introduced the Curfew Bell; So at the early hour of eight Each doused his glim, raked out his grate. In bed at eight P.M. each day ...
— A Humorous History of England • C. Harrison
... as if he were on dry land, - an accomplishment which he had learnt of the Count Doembrownski, a Russian gentleman, who, in his own country, lived chiefly on skates, and, in this country, on pigeons, and whose short residence in Oxford was suddenly brought to a full stop by the arbitrary power of the Vice-Chancellor. So, Mr. Verdant Green was persuaded to purchase, and put on a pair of skates, and to make his first appearance as a skater in the Christ Church meadows, under the auspices of ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... without a distinct objective point in view. Church and prayer-meeting at the tiny frame house of worship on the Pike were the principal dissipations of this "household of women." Though Arethusa had often rebelled inwardly at these arbitrary decisions which so limited her excursions abroad, outward rebellion would have done her no good; Miss Eliza was firm and ruled her little kingdom with ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... it must take? It must first remember that its right to punish is not an inherent, but a delegated one. Though its powers are sovereign in the sense that there is no appeal from them, yet they must not be exercised in an arbitrary way. So far as there is a capacity for the realisation of responsibility to God so far must that responsibility be observed. Where this responsibility is disregarded, society immediately becomes the greater criminal itself even though its deeds may be done ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... popular vote. All disagreements as to wages, position, promotion, all questions of personal issue between saleswomen and aislemen, or others in authority, are referred to the Board of Arbitration, and the board's decision is final. There is no tyranny of the buyer, no arbitrary authority of the head of a department. Every clerk knows that her tenure is secure as long as she is an ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... make the one a speaking picture without really knowing what it can and ought to paint, and the other a dumb poem without having considered in how far painting can express universal ideas without abandoning its proper sphere and degenerating into an arbitrary method of writing.... Since the artist can use but a single moment of ever-changing Nature, and the painter must further confine his study of this one moment to a single point of view, while their works are made not simply to be looked at, but to be contemplated ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... Mr. Evringham, being most arbitrary and peculiar in his tastes, could only gain time by clearing his throat again, and taking a drink ...
— Jewel - A Chapter In Her Life • Clara Louise Burnham
... conclusions at which Dr. Jackson has arrived are such as might be expected to follow from his method of procedure. For he takes words without regard to their connection, and pieces together different parts of dialogues in a purely arbitrary manner, although there is no indication that the author intended the two passages to be so combined, or that when he appears to be experimenting on the different points of view from which a subject of philosophy may be regarded, he is secretly elaborating a system. By such a use of language any premises ...
— Charmides • Plato
... said the schoolmaster in conclusion, "would but once represent to himself that the man whom he regards as beneath him, may nevertheless be immeasurably above him—and that after no arbitrary judgment, but according to the absolute facts of creation, the scale of the kingdom of God, in which being is rank; if he could persuade himself of the possibility that he may yet have to worship ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... this were repeated as often as any fresh wrong arose from the side of Andre or his party; and in proportion as the attacks made by Bertrand and his friends gained in vehemence—and we must add, in justice—so did Joan's objections weaken. The Hungarian rule, as it became more and more arbitrary and unbearable, irritated men's minds to such a point that the people murmured in secret and the nobles proclaimed aloud their discontent. Andre's soldiers indulged in a libertinage which would have been intolerable in a conquered city: they were found everywhere brawling in the taverns or rolling ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - JOAN OF NAPLES—1343-1382 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... learned about the fairness of taxation may be used to illustrate certain periods of history when people struggled against unjust and arbitrary taxation; for example, Wat Tyler's Rebellion, the Civil War in England in the seventeenth century, the American and French Revolutions, Acts of Parliament in Canada from the Quebec Act to the Act ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: History • Ontario Ministry of Education
... poem had made some sensation there. It is singular that Collinson should, throughout his composition, speak of Nazareth as being on the sea-shore—which is the reverse of the fact. The Praeraphaelites, with all their love of exact truth to nature, were a little arbitrary in applying the principle; and Collinson seems to have regarded it as quite superfluous to look into a map, and see whether Nazareth was near the sea or not. Or possibly he trusted to Dante Rossetti's poem "Ave," in which likewise Nazareth is a marine town. ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... niece, Love rides by ordinary with a dripping spur, and is still as arbitrary as in the day when Mars was taken with a net and amorous Jove bellowed in Europa's kail-yard. My faith! if Love distemper thus the spectral ichor of the gods, is it remarkable that the warmer blood of man pulses rather vehemently at his bidding? It were the least of Cupid's miracles ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell |
