Sentence examples for arbitrary affairs from inspiring English sources

About a century ago, Claude Debussy described musical competitions as "purely arbitrary affairs," and complained not only that "the contestants are trained like racehorses," but also that the blue ribbon -- or the gold medal in today's inflated terms -- excused listeners from exercising their own critical judgment.

Debussy called them "a purely arbitrary affair".

Is the distinction between real causes and mere background conditions merely an arbitrary and unsystematic affair?

Speaking at a function in a remote village on March 24th, he insisted that Sri Lanka will not tolerate "arbitrary interference" in its affairs.So no deal, and no compromise.

On his version of the correspondence theory (a more elaborated variant of (4) applied to statements), a statement as a whole is correlated to a state of affairs by arbitrary linguistic conventions without mirroring the inner structure of its correlate (cf. also Vision 2004).

Pettit, who has done more than anyone else to develop this republican conception of freedom philosophically, puts it thus: a person or group enjoys freedom to the extent that no other person or group has "the capacity to interfere in their affairs on an arbitrary basis" (1999, 165; cf. Pettit 1996, 1997, 2001, 2003, 2012).

Đông had become discontented with Diệm's arbitrary rule and constant meddling in military affairs.

Guellali with Human Rights Watch says the whole affair is emblematic of "widespread arbitrary law enforcement" practices in Tunisia, and shines a light on how out of step the country's legal system is with international norms.

Back in Vietnam, Đông became discontented with Diệm's arbitrary rule and constant meddling in the internal affairs of the army.

In favor of the claim that morality could not wholly depend on something arbitrary: when we say that some moral state of affairs obtains, we take it that there is a reason for that moral state of affairs obtaining rather than another.

Annual licences are granted by the information affairs authority (IAA) and their renewal can be arbitrary.