Mutatis Mutandis - Quotations

Quotations

• 2010, Lord Rodger of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom:

To illustrate the point with trivial stereotypical examples from British society: just as male heterosexuals are free to enjoy themselves playing rugby, drinking beer and talking about girls with their mates, so male homosexuals are to be free to enjoy themselves going to Kylie concerts, drinking exotically coloured cocktails and talking about boys with their straight female mates. Mutatis mutandis – and in many cases the adaptations would obviously be great – the same must apply to other societies.

• 1998, U.S. bankruptcy court analysis of use in a legal document:

This Latin phrase simply means that the necessary changes in details, such as names and places, will be made but everything else will remain the same.

• "We can in fact only define a weed, mutatis mutandis, in terms of the well-known definition of dirt — as matter out of place. What we call a weed is in fact merely a plant growing where we do not want it." — E.J. Salisbury, The Living Garden, 1935.
• "The proof that Q is universal relative to the set of all 3-bit gates applies step by step, mutatis mutandis, to Q₄." — D. Deutsch, Quantum computational networks, Proc. R. Soc. Lond. A 425, pp. 85, 1989.
• "A friend of mine has a son whose case, mutatis mutandis, is very much like yours" - Proust, Within a Budding Grove.
• "If you were born in Arkansas and you think Christianity is true and Islam false, knowing full well that you would think the opposite if you had been born in Afghanistan, you are the victim of childhood indoctrination. Mutatis mutandis if you were born in Afghanistan." - Richard Dawkins, "The God Delusion" preface, 2006.
• "Mutatis mutandis. He did what needed to be done." - Companion of Trevor Goodchild, Aeon Flux: "The Purge".
• "I believe the soul in Paradise must enjoy something nearer to a perpetual vigorous adulthood than to any other state we know. At least that is my hope. Not that Paradise could disappoint, but I believe Boughton is right to enjoy the imagination of heaven as the best pleasure of this world. I don't see how he can be entirely wrong, approaching it that way. I certainly don't mind the thought of your mother finding me a strong young man. There is neither male nor female, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but, mutatis mutandis, it would be a fine thing. That mutandis! Such a burden on one word!" - Marilynne Robinson, Gilead.