Arbitrary

Arbitrary rulers throughout history have bartered their subjects’ welfare for what they consider honor, and glory, and conquest.

Thus condemn’d, The current of my former life was stemm’d, And to this arbitrary queen of sense I bow’d a tranced vassal: nor would thence Have moved, even though Amphion’s harp had woo’d Me back to Scylla o’er the billows rude.

X But strange to say, all these measures, efforts, and plans—which were not at all worse than others issued in similar circumstances—did not affect the essence of the matter but, like the hands of a clock detached from the mechanism, swung about in an arbitrary and aimless way without engaging the cogwheels.

those things are so often based on arbitrary judgments when they are right.

Although the presiding Genii in such an office as this, exercise a summary and arbitrary power over the liberties, the good name, the character, almost the lives, of Her Majesty’s subjects, especially of the poorer class; and although, within such walls, enough fantastic tricks are daily played to make the angels blind with weeping; they are closed to the public, save through the medium of the daily press.1 Mr. Fang was consequently not a little indignant to see an unbidden guest enter in such irreverent disorder.

He is a seemingly arbitrary man, but this is because he knows what he is talking about better than anyone else.

If we employ an arbitrary symbol, and pay, say, five dollars a day for farm-work, then the cost of a bushel of wheat is fifty cents.” “You say ‘for farm-work,’ ” said Mr. Maynard.

His sons, who seek the tyrant to sustain, And long for arbitrary lords again, With ignominy scourg’d, in open sight, He dooms to death deserv’d, asserting public right.

The recluse does not believe that a philosopher—supposing that a philosopher has always in the first place been a recluse—ever expressed his actual and ultimate opinions in books: are not books written precisely to hide what is in us?—indeed, he will doubt whether a philosopher can have “ultimate and actual” opinions at all; whether behind every cave in him there is not, and must necessarily be, a still deeper cave: an ampler, stranger, richer world beyond the surface, an abyss behind every bottom, beneath every “foundation.” Every philosophy is a foreground philosophy—this is a recluse’s verdict: “There is something arbitrary in the fact that the philosopher came to a stand here, took a retrospect, and looked around; that he here laid his spade aside and did not dig any deeper—there is also something suspicious in it.” Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a lurking-place, every word is also a mask.

Though, in these cases, the direction taken by any one whale be straight as a surveyor’s parallel, and though the line of advance be strictly confined to its own unavoidable, straight wake, yet the arbitrary vein in which at these times he is said to swim, generally embraces some few miles in width (more or less, as the vein is presumed to expand or contract); but never exceeds the visual sweep from the whale-ship’s mastheads, when circumspectly gliding along this magic zone.

It must be remembered that at that epoch the police was not precisely at its ease; the free press embarrassed it; several arbitrary arrests denounced by the newspapers, had echoed even as far as the Chambers, and had rendered the Prefecture timid.

At first it seems arbitrary, then I see a pattern, like an intricate maze, appearing in the moonlight on Beetee's side.

A course that lay between undue clemency and excessive rigour: the dispensation in a heterogeneous society of arbitrary classes, incessantly rearranged in terms of greater and lesser social inequality, of unbiassed homogeneous indisputable justice, tempered with mitigants of the widest possible latitude but exactable to the uttermost farthing with confiscation of estate, real and personal, to the crown.

Servants were afraid of the sword of justice and of the steward’s whip, not because the one might put an arbitrary term to their existence, and the other print red rivers of pain about their sides, but because these were the symbols and the means to which their obedience was vowed.

It was late afternoon by the clock of their arbitrary routine and Lucilla had just swept away in anger after a vituperative confrontation.

Many years ago, when comparing, and seeing others compare, the birds from the closely neighbouring islands of the Galapagos Archipelago, 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.

As for my division of people into ordinary and extraordinary, I acknowledge that it’s somewhat arbitrary, but I don’t insist upon exact numbers.

Haste, launch thy vessels, fly with speed away; Rule thy own realms with arbitrary sway; I heed thee not, but prize at equal rate Thy short-lived friendship, and thy groundless hate.

War hath determined us, and foiled with loss Irreparable; terms of peace yet none Vouchsafed or sought; for what peace will be given To us enslaved, but custody severe, And stripes, and arbitrary punishment Inflicted?

Arbitrary law had not yet established itself in the mind of the judge, for then there was no cause to judge and no one to be judged.

He studied every floating object fearfully for some gruesome sign of Clevinger and Orr, prepared for any morbid shock but the shock McWatt gave him one day with the plane that came blasting suddenly into sight out of the distant stillness and hurtled mercilessly along the shore line with a great growling, clattering roar over the bobbing raft on which blond, pale Kid Sampson, his naked sides scrawny even from so far away, leaped clownishly up to touch it at the exact moment some arbitrary gust of wind or minor miscalculation of McWatt’s senses dropped the speeding plane down just low enough for a propeller to slice him half away.

That the condition of a slave is better under an arbitrary than under a free government, is, I believe, supported by the history of all ages and nations.