Definition Quotes - page 36

Locke supposes that a person acquainted sensibly with the colours which compose a rainbow, can by the names of such colours in a verbal description, be made visually acquainted with a rainbow. The verbal description will give such a person's intellect a good verbal definition of the word rainbow, but it cannot communicate the sight to the extent that it differs, in any manner from the sights he already knows. (Alexander Bryan Johnson)
And so, by definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Conventions Against Torture. View quote
Condoleezza Rice
‘This second time round, she'd discovered that to be happy was not so much a self-sufficient, spontaneous emotion, such as you might feel in relation to a dream or a secret, but a way of reacting to the rest of the world; that to be happy this time, she must curb the natural human instinct to look up at the sky, with its all-encompassing definition, and gaze towards the immediate ground and horizon, with its lack of shape, or abode, or clear ending.' View quote
Amit Chaudhuri
Perhaps Time's Definition of Coal is the Diamond. View quote
Kahlil Gibran
It is said, in fact, that the definition of a white South African is "someone who would rather be murdered in their bed than make it.”. View quote
Arthur Kemp
I think everybody has their own way of looking at their lives as some kind of pilgrimage. Some people will see their role as a pilgrim in terms of setting up a fine family, or establishing a business inheritance. Everyone's got their own definition. View quote
Eric Clapton
One definition of man is 'an intelligence served by organs.' View quote
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I think maybe even one of the reasons I became an actor was actually to hide. I mean, it sounds paradoxical because, of course, people are standing up in a public place and encouraging other people to look at them. So that's not the conventional definition of hiding. View quote
Hugh Laurie
[M]emory politics are by definition political and shift accordingly. There was a time when both the South Korean left and North Korea were more interested in good relations with Japan than the right here was. View quote
Brian Reynolds Myers
The core of a root definition of a system will be a transformation process (T), the means by which defined inputs are transformed into defined outputs. The transformation will include the direct object of the main activity verbs subsequently required to describe the system. View quote
Peter Checkland
A root definition describing a notional system chosen for its relevance to what the investigator and/or people in the problem situation perceive as matters of contention. (Peter Checkland)
This, then, is the Anarchistic definition of government: the subjection of the non-invasive individual to an external will. View quote
Benjamin Tucker
I think what's happening here is, there's a group or maybe one person who is saying this is gonna be the definition and this is what we want to get the kids to do now. View quote
Grandmaster Flash
Someone yelled at me once, 'You never write about yourself.' People used to get so mad at me for that. But my definition of myself is completely up for grabs. I'm everywhere, just like we all are. View quote
Suzan-Lori Parks
If I had to give a definition of capitalism I would say: the process whereby American girls turn into American women. View quote
Christopher Hampton
As I thought about this, I noted that the bacterium is just a physical system; it's just a bunch of molecules that hang together and do things to one another. So, I wondered, what characteristics are necessary for a physical system to be an autonomous agent? After thinking about this for a number of months I came up with a tentative definition. My definition is that an autonomous agent is something that can both reproduce itself and do at least one thermodynamic work cycle. It turns out that this is true of all free-living cells, excepting weird special cases. They all do work cycles, just like the bacterium spinning its flagellum as it swims up the glucose gradient. The cells in your body are busy doing work cycles all the time. View quote
Stuart Kauffman
As we turn over the pages of nineteenth century literature, we are constantly confronted with the question of alienation. Baudelaire, Marx, Kierkegaard, Chateaubriand, Cardinal Newman - it does not matter whether the voice comes from the Left or the Right; all are agreed in their rejection of the values of the prevailing ethic. Yet we never get a clear definition of alienation: what is man alienated from, and why? Perhaps it is precisely the democratic society, the growing affluence and education, that have revealed the natural state of man - much as the development of medicine has enabled greater accuracy of diagnosis, with the resultant tremendous increase in the record of certain diseases. Perhaps the discovery of human self-alienation was simply a statistical refinement made possible by the spread of the privileges of culture to the middle classes. View quote
Kenneth Rexroth
The only definition by which Americas best days are behind it is on a purely relative basis. View quote
Bill Gates
The progress of the nation in wealth and refinement, however, naturally brought with it an increase in the number of crimes, as the old definition of offences became inadequate. View quote
Edward Jenks
There are, as we know, powerful and illustrious atheists. At bottom, led back to the truth by their very force, they are not absolutely sure that they are atheists; it is with them only a question of definition, and in any case, if they do not believe in God, being great minds, they prove God. View quote
Victor Hugo
In neither his definition nor the examples illustrating what memes are does Dawkins mention anything that would distinguish memes from concepts. (Ernst Mayr)
Now as before it is the vulgar and the vital and the possibility of its transformation into the beautiful which continues to challenge and fascinate me... Or perhaps the subject of my art is like the definition of humor - emotional pain remembered in tranquillity. View quote
Grace Hartigan
Any government, that is its own judge of, and determines authoritatively for the people, what are its own powers over the people, is an absolute government of course. It has all the powers that it chooses to exercise. There is no other or at least no more accurate definition of a despotism than this. View quote
Lysander Spooner
The definition of throwing your vote away is to go into that voting booth and vote for one of two parties that will not change the direction this country's going in. View quote
Bob Barr
Prayer is petition, intercession, adoration, and contemplation; great saints and mystics have agreed on this definition. To stop short at petition is to pray only in a crippled fashion. View quote
Robertson Davies