Contingency Quotes - Page 4

Fiction, with its preference for what is small and might elsewhere seem irrelevant; its facility for smuggling us into another skin and allowing us to live a new life there; its painstaking devotion to what without it might go unnoticed and unseen; its respect for contingency, and the unlikely and odd; its willingness to expose itself to moments of low, almost animal being and make them nobly illuminating, can deliver truths we might not otherwise stumble on.

David Malouf

Animal, Skins, Unseen

David Malouf (2011). “The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World”, p.87, Black Inc.

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A good portfolio is more than a long list of good stocks and bonds. It is a balanced whole, providing the investor with protections and opportunities with respect to a wide range of contingencies.

Harry Markowitz

Business, Opportunity, Long

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One thing that I am sure of, and which I can answer truthfully, is that whatever the contingencies that may arise here, wherever I am there will be no communism.

Francisco Franco

Answers, May, Communism

"Francisco Franco : The Times and the Man" by Joaquin Arraras, (p. 159), 1938.

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So-called real life has only once interfered with me, and it had been a far cry from what the words, lines, books had prepared me for. Fate had to do with blind seers, oracles, choruses announcing death, not with panting next to the refrigerator, fumbling with condoms, waiting in a Honda parked round the corner and surreptitious encounters in a Lisbon hotel. Only the written word exists, everything one must do oneself is without form, subject to contingency without rhyme or reason. It takes too long. And if it ends badly the metre isn't right, and there's no way to cross things out.

Cees Nooteboom

Real, Book, Fate

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It may safely be received as an axiom in our political system, that the state governments will in all possible contingencies afford complete security against invasions of the public liberty by the national authority.

Alexander Hamilton

Government, Political, Liberty

Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay (2016). “The Federalist Papers and the Constitution of the United States: The Principles of the American Government”, p.151, Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

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I view the major features of my own odyssey as a set of mostly fortunate contingencies. I was not destined by inherited mentality or family tradition to become a paleontologist. I can locate no tradition for scientific or intellectual careers anywhere on either side of my eastern European Jewish background. I view my serious and lifelong commitment to baseball in entirely the same manner: purely as a contingent circumstance of numerous, albeit not entirely capricious, accidents.

Stephen Jay Gould

Baseball, Commitment, Views

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Contingency is rich and fascinating; it embodies an exquisite tension between the power of individuals to modify history and the intelligible limits set by laws of nature. The details of individual and species's lives are not mere frills, without power to shape the large-scale course of events, but particulars that can alter entire futures, profoundly and forever.

Stephen Jay Gould

Law, Forever, Shapes

Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in Natural History”, p.77, W. W. Norton & Company

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But [in bureaucracies], too, decision making takes place in a world full of unceratinties. Any actual system of information processing, planning and control will never be optimal but merely practical, applying rote responses to recurrent problems and employing a variety of contingency tactics to deal with unforeseen events.

Manuel De Landa

Information Processing, Decision, Events

Manuel De Landa (1997). “A thousand years of nonlinear history”, Zone Books (NY)

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[A] power equal to every possible contingency must exist somewhere in the government . . .

Alexander Hamilton

Government, Equal

Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay (2015). “The Federalist Papers: A Collection of Essays Written in Favour of the New Constitution”, p.125, Coventry House Publishing

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Yet Gotama's Dhamma is more than just a series of axioms. It is to be lived rather than simply adopted and believed in. It entails that one embrace this world in all its contingency and specificity, with all its ambiguity and flaws.

Stephen Batchelor

World, Flaws, Embrace

Stephen Batchelor (2010). “Confession of a Buddhist Atheist”, p.246, Spiegel & Grau

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Certainly, I know what to do, and when I am Vice President -- and I will be -- there will be contingency plans under different sets of situations and I tell you what, I'm not going to go out and hold a news conference about it. I'm going to put it in a safe and keep it there! Does that answer your question?

Dan Quayle

President, Safe, Politics

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The guarantee of safety in a battering relationship can never be based upon a promise from the perpetrator, no matter how heartfelt. Rather, it must be based upon the self-protective capability of the victim. Until the victim has developed a detailed and realistic contingency plan and has demonstrated her ability to carry it out, she remains in danger of repeated abuse.

Judith Lewis Herman

Self, Safety, Heartfelt

"Trauma and Recovery". Book by Judith Lewis Herman, 1992.

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Leibniz believed in freedom, both divine and human, and he thought that contingency was a necessary condition of freedom. That is, if an agent A acts freely when choosing X, then A's choosing X cannot be necessary. But there are some elements in his philosophy that seem to make contingency impossible.

Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra

Philosophy, Elements, Agents

Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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...she moved about in a mental cloud of many-coloured idealities, which eclipsed all sinister contingencies by its brightness.

Thomas Hardy

Clouds, Brightness, Sinister

Thomas Hardy (2016). “Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman”, p.257, Thomas Hardy

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... regard this body as a machine which, having been made by the hand of God, is incomparably better ordered than any machine that can be devised by man, and contains in itself movements more wonderful than those in any machine. ... it is for all practical purposes impossible for a machine to have enough organs to make it act in all the contingencies of life in the way in which our reason makes us act.

Rene Descartes

Men, Hands, Purpose

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There are contingency plans in the NATO doctrine to fire a nuclear weapon for demonstrative purposes, to demonstrate to the other side that they are exceeding the limits of toleration in the conventional area.

Alexander Haig

Power, Fire, Doctrine

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McIntosh is persuasive in his arguments that the scientific facts of evolution cannot stand alone ... science shows that historical evolution, whatever its contingencies, is itself on a trajectory of values development. McIntosh has well-researched his sources and integrated them with seminal insight.

Holmes Rolston III

Historical, Development, Facts

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In brief, nationalism is a theory of political legitimacy, which requires the ethnic boundaries should not be cut across political ones, and, in particular, that ethnic boundaries within a given state a contingency already formally excluded by the principle in its general formulation should not separate the power holders from the rest.

Ernest Gellner

Cutting, Political, Principles

Ernest Gellner, John Breuilly (2008). “Nations and Nationalism”, p.1, Cornell University Press

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McEwan's Atonement…truly dazzles, proving to be as much about the art and morality of writing as it is about the past…. The middle section of Atonement, the two vividly realized set pieces of Robbie's trek to the Channel and Briony's experiences with the wounded evacuees of Dunkirk, would alone have made an outstanding novel…. There is wonderful writing throughout as McEwan weaves his many themes — the accidents of contingency, the sins of absent fathers, class oppression — into his narrative, and in a magical love scene.

Noah Richler

Art, Father, Writing

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It seems the height of antiquated hubris to claim that the universe carried on as it did for billions of years in order to form a comfortable abode for us. Chance and historical contingency give the world of life most of its glory and fascination. I sit here happy to be alive and sure that some reason must exist for "why me?" Or the earth might have been totally covered with water, and an octopus might now be telling its children why the eight-legged God of all things had made such a perfect world for cephalopods.

Stephen Jay Gould

Children, Octopus, Eight

Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “An Urchin in the Storm: Essays about Books and Ideas”, p.206, W. W. Norton & Company

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Books, like lives, are always unfinished even when they end, for to write is to struggle with contingency, to impose a certain false order upon the endless, and endlessly frustrating, nature of thought.

Mark Kingwell

Struggle, Book, Writing

Mark Kingwell (2000). “The World We Want: Restoring Citizenship in a Fractured Age”, p.22, Rowman & Littlefield

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The more a man is successful in getting out (or coming out) from his own individuality, of his egoist self, and to control (or dominate) the instincts of his physical nature, the more his character, by rising above material contingencies, widen, become free and independent.

African Spir

Character, Independent, Successful

"Paroles d'un sage: Choix de pensées d'African Spir" ("Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir") by Hélène Claparède-Spir, (p. 60), 1937.

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