Arbiter It Quotes & Sayings

Counting coup?" Leister asked. He was the sole subordinate that Vantage had brought along. Rime, by contrast, had brought Usher and Arbiter from her team. Prefab from San Diego had shown up as well.

I explained, "The term came from the Native Americans' style of warfare. In a fight, one person makes a risky, successful play against the other side showing their prowess. They gain reputation, the other side loses some. All it is, though, is a game. A way to train and make sure you're up to snuff against the real threats without losing anything. — Wildbow

With regard to the learned professions, little need be observed; they truly form no distinct interest in society ... [discussing the landed, merchant, and learned classes in legislative assembly]. Will not the man of the learned profession, who will feel a neutrality to the rivalships between the different branches of industry, be likely to prove an impartial arbiter between them, ready to promote either, so far as it shall appear to him conducive to the general interests of society? — Alexander Hamilton

Placing a box or a can or a bottle in a recycling bin doesn't mean you've recycled anything, and it doesn't make you a better, greener person: it just means you've outsourced your problem. Sometimes that outsourcing is near home; and sometimes it's overseas. But wherever it goes, the global market and demand for raw materials is the ultimate arbiter. Fortunately, if that realization leaves you feeling bad, there's always the alternative: stop buying so much crap in the first place. — Adam Minter

The National Security Adviser is supposed to be an arbiter of policy and open minded in internal debates. But the playing field was never balanced. It was always tilted toward Rumsfeld's position, which is obviously the same as Bush's. — Seymour Hersh

The conductor is the artistic leader and sometimes cultural arbiter of his or her community. It is their leadership that is looked to and should anything go wrong, they are the persons taking most of the heat. — Leonard Slatkin

We spend vast amounts of our time an emotional energy in learning how not to be natural and in eluding the trap of our own nature and it therefore becomes very difficult to know exactly what is meant when we speak of the unnatural. It is not possible to have it both ways, to use nature at one time as the final arbiter of human conduct and at another to oppose her as angrily as we do. — James Baldwin

Human Error lies in judgment. While many will say that it's wrong to judge, one cannot survive in the light or the darkness without equipping the ability to judge. One must judge their morality. One must judge their potentiality. One must judge their actuality. One must judge their life. One must judge their very existence. What happens when God no longer lends a helping a hand? What happens when
God longer judges you? Only you can be the arbiter of your own existence. However, you will have to judge. So let me ask you, what's the difference between judging the subjective reality that one exists in, and judging the value of the subjective reality of another? The only difference lies is the sameness of one conception ... judgment. So tell me, is it wrong to judge others, when your very existence depends on you judging reality for validity? — Lionel Suggs

So someone can ask me what reflects my interpretation of the way things are, and I can tell them where they can get material that looks at the world the way I think it ought to be looked at-but then they have to decide whether or not that's accurate. Ultimately it's your own mind that has to be the arbiter: you've got to rely on your own common sense and intelligence, you can't rely on anyone else for the truth. — Noam Chomsky

A government is a compulsory territorial monopolist of ultimate decision-making (jurisdiction) and, implied in this, a compulsory territorial monopolist of taxation. That is, a government is the ultimate arbiter, for the inhabitants of a given territory, regarding what is just and what is not, and it can determine unilaterally, i.e., without requiring the consent of those seeking justice or arbitration, the price that justice-seekers must pay to the government for providing this service. — Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Relativism poses as humble by saying: "We are not smart enough to know what the truth is - or if there is any universal truth." It sounds humble. But look carefully at what is happening. It's like a servant saying: I am not smart enough to know which person here is my master - or if I even have a master. The result is that I don't have a master and I can be my own master. That is in reality what happens to relativists: In claiming to be too lowly to know the truth, they exalt themselves as supreme arbiter of what they can think and do. This is not humility. This is the essence of pride. — John Piper

Yes, nitroglycerin," Simoun repeated slowly, with a frigid smile, staring at the glass flask with delight. "It's more than nitroglycerin, however. It's a concentration of tears, compressed, hatred, injustices, offenses. This is the supreme arbiter of weakness, force against force, violence against violence ... a moment ago I was hesitating, but then you arrived and convinced me. Tonight those most dangerous of tyrants who have hidden behind God and the state, whose abuses remain unpunished because no one can take them to task. Tonight, the Philippines will hear an explosion that will convert into rubble the infamous monument whose rottenness I helped bring about. — Jose Rizal

Is it what you call civilization that makes England flourish? Is it the universal development of the faculties of man that has rendered an island, almost unknown to the ancients, the
arbiter of the world? Clearly not. It is the inhabitants that have done this. It is an affair of race ... All is race, there is no other truth. — Benjamin Disraeli

I think that just because you've been through an experience doesn't make you the ultimate arbiter of what it means. We figure things out; we work things out through the help of other people who can engage with us but also be intelligently critical. — Phil Klay

It is indeed a misfortune for a woman to be without beauty, as with men the eye is the chief arbiter of qualities in the sex. Her beauty is her capital
her worth in the market matrimonial depends upon it. With her the Virtues are less reverenced when unaccompanied by the Graces. The sex understand this very well; and hence they seek mainly to make captive the eye, knowing the mind and heart will follow as a matter of course. — Christian Nestell Bovee

Do I believe in God? Sure. So I believe the Bible is the arbiter of theological knowledge? There it gets a little hazy. — Don Hoesel

It was a single poppy seed ... she rolled it between her fingers and raised her eyes past the straining sails, to the star-filled vault above. On any other night she would have scanned the sky for the planet she had always thought to be the arbiter of her fate - but tonight her eyes dropped instead to the tiny sphere she was holding between her thumb and forefinger. She looked at the seed as if she had never seen one before, and suddenly she knew that it was not the planet above that governed her life: it was this minuscule orb - at once bountiful and all-devouring, merciful and destructive, sustaining and vengeful. This was her Shani, her Saturn. — Amitav Ghosh

I was thinking of the Cumaean Sybil, who lived for a thousand years, so long that she shrank and was put in an urn. Eliot quoted it as epigraph for 'The Waste Land,' from Petronius Arbiter's Satyricon, 'For once I saw with my own eyes the Cumaean Sibyl hanging in a jar. When the boys asked her, "Sibyl, what do you want?" she said, "I want to die. — Lauren Groff

The job of the critic, as it might have been conceived in the 1950's or 1960's, was some kind of role of moral arbiter for people, not a huge number of people, but people who were, you know, fairly educated, well-placed people. — Louis Menand

If you want to win this argument with Dad, look in chapter two of the first book of the Feynman Lectures on Physics. There's a quote there about how philosophers say a great deal about what science absolutely requires, and it is all wrong, because the only rule in science is that the final arbiter is observation - that you just have to look at the world and report what you see. Um ... off the top of my head I can't think of where to find something about how it's an ideal of science to settle things by experiment instead of arguments - — Eliezer Yudkowsky

Taking the decision-making process away from people disempowers them. It also makes them much less likely to buy into the decision, however right it may be. One's own conscience remains the ultimate arbiter. — Lama Surya Das

When I saw the head part from the body and how they thumped separately into the box, I understood, not with my mind but with my whole being, that no theory of the reasonableness of our present progress could justify this deed; and that though everybody from the creation of the world had held it to be necessary, on whatever theory, I knew it to be unnecessary and bad; and therefore the arbiter of what is good and evil is not what people say and do, nor is it progress, but it is my heart and I. — Leo Tolstoy

The word 'truth' itself ceases to have its old meaning. It describes no longer something to be found, with the individual conscience as the sole arbiter of whether in any particular instance the evidence (or the standing of those proclaiming it) warrants a belief; it becomes something to be laid down by authority, something which has to believed in the interest of unity of the organized effort and which may have to be altered as the exigencies of this organized effort require it. — Friedrich Hayek

For, while the authority of the doctor or plumber is never questioned, everyone deems himself a good judge and an adequate arbiter of what a work of art should be and how it should be done. — Mark Rothko

The Supreme Court is not elected, and it is therefore not a proper arbiter of social policy. — Lamar S. Smith

If ever there was a sentence more quickly imprinted in my consciousness, more oft repeated, one that stood as more of an arbiter against which to judge all else, I do not know it. In the beginning, the repetition was the numb sort, the words impenetrable. Only occasionally did they have the power to stop me midstep as I walked upstairs. Or seize my stomach as I ate. Or clear my head as I attempted to speak. — Miriam Gershow

I, like most scientific types, came to believe in the possibility of a material conception of reality, an ultimately scientific worldview that would grant a complete metaphysics,, minus outmoded concepts like souls, God, and bearded white men in robes. I spent a good chunk of my twenties trying to build a frame for such an endeavor. The problem, however, eventually became evident: to make science the arbiter of metaphysics is to banish not only God from the world but also love, hate, meaning - to consider a world that is self-evidently not the world we live in. That's not to say that if you believe in meaning, you must also believe in God. It is to say, though, thay if you believe that science provides no basis for God, then you are almost obligated to conclude that science provides no basis for meaning and, therefore, life itself doesn't have any. In other words, existential claims have no weight; all knowledge is scientific knowledge. — Paul Kalanithi

And he then you will remember that for you to go to harvard has been your mothers dream since you were born and no compson has ever disappointed a lady and i temporary it will be better for me for all of us and he every man is the arbiter of his own virtues but let no man prescribe for another mans wellbeing and i temporary and he was the saddest word of all there is nothing else in the world its not despair until time its not even time until it was The last note sounded. At — William Faulkner

Recycling is better--I won't write "good"--for the environment. But without economics--without supply and demand of raw materials--recycling is nothing more than a meaningless exercise in glorifying garbage. No doubt it's better than throwing something into an incinerator, and worse than fixing something that can be refurbished. It's what you do if you can't bear to see something landfilled. Placing a box or a can or a bottle in a recycling bin doesn't mean you've recycled anything, and it doesn't make you a better, greener person: it just means you've outsourced your problem. Sometimes that outsourcing is near home; and sometimes it's overseas. But wherever it goes, the global market and demand for raw materials is the ultimate arbiter.

Fortunately, if that realization leaves you feeling bad, there's always the alternative: stop buying so much crap in the first place. (269) — Adam Minter

Emotion is the surest arbiter of a poetic choice, and it is the priest of all supreme unions in the mind. — Max Eastman

But the Chief Justice says, 'There must be an ultimate arbiter somewhere.' True, there must; but does that prove it is either party? The ultimate arbiter is the people of the Union, assembled by their deputies in convention, at the call of Congress or of two-thirds of the States. Let them decide to which they mean to give an authority claimed by two of their organs. And it has been the peculiar wisdom and felicity of our Constitution, to have provided this peaceable appeal, where that of other nations is at once to force. — Thomas Jefferson

The best reason to abolish it, in my opinion, is that everyone should deal with his time in the best way; there is no good reason why you should get half a minute extra with each move, except that it's a bit easier for the arbiter. — Jan Timman

For mothers, some mothers, my mother, daughters are division and sons are multiplication; the former reduce them, fracture them, take from them, the latter augment and enhance. My mother, who would light up at the thought that my brothers were handsome, rankled at the idea that I might be nice-looking. The queen's envy of Snow White is deadly. It's based on the desire to be the most beautiful of all, and it raises the question of whose admiration she needs and what she thinks Snow White is competing for, this child whose beauty is an affliction. At the back of this drama between women are men, the men for whom the queen wants to be beautiful, the men whose attention is the arbiter of worth and worthlessness. — Rebecca Solnit

Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? — Alexis De Tocqueville

Just by imagining the clump it seemed to me that I could hear whispers secret surges smell the beating of hot blood under wild unsecret flesh watching against red eyelids the swine untethered in pairs rushing coupled into the sea and he we must just stay awake and see evil done for a little while its not always and i it doesnt have to be even that long for a man of courage and he do you consider that courage and i yes sir dont you and he every man is the arbiter of his own virtues whether or not you consider it courageous is of more importance than the act itself than any act otherwise you could not be in earnest and i you dont believe i am serious and he i think you are too serious to give me any cause for alarm you wouldnt have felt driven to the expedient of telling me you had committed incest otherwise and i i wasnt lying i wasnt lying and he you wanted to sublimate a piece of natural human folly into a horror and then exorcise it with truth — William Faulkner

The State has a legal monopoly on the right to use aggression against others in the form of taxation and compulsory edicts (legislation). Not only must "customers" pay into its operation without regard to their consent, but they must surrender to the rules its internal processes determine at all times. Additionally, the State has a monopoly on the provision of security, and has anointed itself as the ultimate arbiter in all conflicts, including those conflicts which involve its own agents. It — Christopher Chase Rachels

The experience that a publication creates for its audience is the very essence of that publication's brand - and without deep engagement, that publication's brand will be weak. A good publication is a convener and an arbiter - it expresses a core narrative that becomes a badge of sorts for its readership. — John Battelle

Anarchism is the great liberator of man from the phantoms that have held him captive; it is the arbiter and pacifier of the two forces for individual and social harmony. — Emma Goldman

I ask, if I shall never see you again and fix my eyes on that solidity, what form will our communication take? You have gone across the court, further and further, drawing finer and finer the thread between us. But you exist somewhere. Something of you remains. A judge. That is, if I discover a new vein in myself I shall submit it to you privately. I shall ask, What is your verdict? You shall remain the arbiter. But for how long? Things will become too difficult to explain: there will be new things; already my son. — Virginia Woolf

The problem, however, eventually became evident: to make science the arbiter of metaphysics is to banish not only God from the world but also love, hate, meaning - to consider a world that is self-evidently not the world we live in. That's not to say that if you believe in meaning, you must also believe in God. It is to say, though, that if you believe that science provides no basis for God, then you are almost obligated to conclude that science provides no basis for meaning and, therefore, life itself doesn't have any. In other words, existential claims have no weight; all knowledge is scientific knowledge. Yet — Paul Kalanithi

Ratio et prudentia curas,
Non locus effusi late maris arbiter, aufert.
[it is reason and wisdom which take away cares, not places affording wide views over the sea.] — Horace

True autism, Jack had decided, was in the last analysis an apathy toward public endeavor; it was a private existence carried on as if the individual person were the creator of all value, rather than merely the repository of inherited values. And Jack Bohlen, for the life of him, could not accept the Public School with its teaching machines as the sole arbiter of what was and what wasn't of value. For the values of a society were in ceaseless flux, and the Public School was an attempt to stabilize those values, to jell them at a fixed point-to embalm them. — Philip K. Dick

If you allow a political catchword to go on and grow, you will awaken some day to find it standing over you, arbiter of your destiny, against which you are powerless. — William Graham Sumner

Traditions are neither good nor bad, they simply are ... Rationality is not an arbiter of traditions, it is itself a tradition or an aspect of a tradition. — Paul Feyerabend

The measures of the reformers took no account of all this which seemed to me so obvious. The reformers themselves apparently did not see that the State, as an arbiter of economic advantage, must necessarily be a potential instrument of economic exploitation. In fact, these are but two ways of saying the same thing, for, as Voltaire saw so clearly, advantage to the State's beneficiaries means disadvantage to those who are not its beneficiaries. By putting a tariff on steel, for example, the State simply took a great deal of money out of the pockets of American purchasers of steel, and put it in Mr. Carnegie's; it acted ad hoc as Mr. Carnegie's instrument of exploitation. Neither — Albert Jay Nock

It is a rash man indeed who would set himself up as final arbiter on all that happened the incredible night the Titanic went down. — Walter Lord

Everyone in my orbit would have a terrible day: the arbiter of days has decreed it. — John Darnielle

Christ, who gave the law and required obedience to it, was willing to abide by the conditions that He had laid down for others, and upon man's failure, to take his place and suffer the penalty that He Himself had ordained. With these facts in mind we can never charge God with injustice. He does not require of anyone that which He is not willing to do Himself. This qualifies Him for being the final judge of mankind, the Arbiter of man's destiny. — M.L. Andreasen

It's one thing to maintain that upper-income earners should pay higher tax rates because they are better able to shoulder the burden for essential government services. But it's constitutional blasphemy to claim that the tax code should be used as a weapon against the wealthy and that the state should be the tyrannical arbiter of how income is distributed. — David Limbaugh

The leader of armies is the arbiter of the people's fate, the man on whom it depends whether the nation shall be in peace or in peril. — Sun Tzu

Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade - with reason, not force, as their final arbiter - it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability - and the degree of a man's productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil? — Ayn Rand

The key, I think, is to hold true to your own aesthetics, that which you value, and yield to no one the power to become the arbiter of your tastes. You must also learn to devise strategies for fending off both attackers and defenders. Exploit aggression, but only in self-defence, the kind of self-defence that announces to all the implacability of your armour, your self-assurance, and affirms the sanctity of your self-esteem. Attack when you must, but not in arrogance. Defend when your values are challenged, but never with the wild fire of anger. Against attackers, your surest defence is cold iron. Against defenders, often the best tactic is to sheathe your weapon and refuse the game. Reserve contempt for those who have truly earned it, but see the contempt you permit yourself to feel not as a weapon, but as armour against their assaults. Finally, be ready to disarm with a smile, even as you cut deep with words. — Steven Erikson

Even what may have seemed, in retrospect, like minor quibbles - over the particular wording of sharia clauses, for example - reflected fundamental divides over the boundaries, limits, and purpose of the nation-state. For liberals, certain rights and freedoms are, by definition, nonnegotiable. They envision the state as a neutral arbiter. Meanwhile, even those Islamists who have little interest in legislating morality see the state as a promoter of a certain set of religious and moral values, through the soft power of the state machinery, the educational system, and the media. For them, these conservative values are not ideologically driven but represent a self-evident popular consensus around the role of religion in public life. The will of the people, particularly when it coincides with the will of God, takes precedence over any presumed international human rights norms. — Shadi Hamid

That's a well-thought out layout," Caldenia said. "But why pink marble?" She waved at the ceiling. "Pink marble, white ceiling, golden accents ... With the electric lighting it will turn into this ghastly orange."
"I had one chance to impress the Arbiter and I had to improvise."
Caldenia arched one eyebrow.
"I saw it in a movie once," I explained. "It was easy to visualize."
"Was it a movie for adults?"
"It had a talking candelabra who was friends with a grumpy clock."
"I see. — Ilona Andrews