Arbitrary Quotes

Be just and if you can't be just, be arbitrary.

William Seward Burroughs

A final moral concerns terminology. Why did such serious people take so seriously axioms which now seem so arbitrary? I suspect that they were misled by the pernicious misuse of the word measurement in contemporary theory. This word very strongly suggests the ascertaining of some preexisting property of some thing, any instrument involved playing a purely passive role. Quantum experiments are just not like that, as we learned especially from Bohr. The results have to be regarded as the joint product of system and apparatus, the complete experimental set-up.

John Stewart Bell