Odds Quotes - Page 23

• When you're picking a basketball team, you'll take the brother over the guy with the yarmulke. Why? Because you're playing the odds.

  Adam Carolla

  Basketball, Brother, Team

  "The man’s man". Interview with Larry Getlen, nypost.com. June 17, 2012.

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• Over futile odds, and laughed at by the gods
  And now the final frame. Love is a losing game.

  Amy Winehouse

  Love Is, Games, Finals

  Song: Love is a Losing Game, Album: Back To Black, 2007

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• Never do today what you can put off till tomorrow if tomorrow might improve the odds.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Understanding, Delay, Might

  "Time Enough for Love" by Robert A. Heinlein, Ace, (p. 334), August 1988.

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• Like a flash of lightning and in an instant the truth was revealed. I drew with a stick on the sand the diagrams of my motor. A thousand secrets of nature which I might have stumbled upon accidentally I would have given for that one which I had wrestled from her against all odds and at the peril of my existence.

  Nikola Tesla

  Secret, Lightning, Might

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• Had [Winston Churchill] been a stable and equable man, he could never have inspired the nation. In 1940, when all the odds were against Britain, a leader of sober judgment might well have concluded that we were finished.

  Anthony Storr

  Depression, Men, Leader

  Anthony Storr (1990). “Churchill's Black Dog, Kafka's Mice, and Other Phenomena of the Human Mind”

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• For those who say you're thinking too big... be smart enough not to listen. For those who say the odds are too small ... be dumb enough to give it a shot. And for those who ask, how can you do that?... look them in the eyes and say, I'll figure it out.

  Eric Schmidt

  Leadership, Smart, Eye

  "40 Things to Learned From Eric Schmidt Speech at Uc Berkeley". piepeaceblog.wordpress.com. January 02, 2017.

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• I hold no brief for Communists, but I believe in and will defend their right to act independently within the law. I question whether members of the committee are interested in defending our form of government or whether they are attempting to suppress political opinion at odds with their own.

  Gregory Peck

  Believe, Political Opinions, Government

  "Gregory Peck: A Charmed Life". Book by Lynn Haney, p. 167, 2003.

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• If you had been a public figure from the time you were a toddler, if you'd had to fight for a life that felt real and honest and normal against all odds, than maybe to you might value privacy above all else. I have given everything up there from the time that I was three-years old. That's reality show enough, don't you think?

  Jodie Foster

  Real, Fighting, Thinking

  “Jodie Foster at Golden Globes: I came out ‘a thousand years ago’” by Kevin P.Sullivan, www.mtv.com. January 13, 2013.

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• As the Republican Party has moved farther and farther to the right, I have found myself increasingly at odds with the Republican philosophy and more in line with the philosophy of the Democratic Party.

  Arlen Specter

  Philosophy, Party, Lines

  Speech on Joining Democratic Party, www.foxnews.com. April 28, 2009.

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• I usually try not to think about actors while writing, because the odds of those stars aligning and you getting those specific people are so rare.

  Diablo Cody

  Stars, Writing, Thinking

  "Diablo Cody on New Movie 'Ricki and the Flash,' Secret Netflix Projects, and Defying the Suburbs". Interview with Jen Oritz, www.marieclaire.com. July 20, 2015.

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• I've always been impressed that we are here, surviving, because of the indomitable courage of quite small people against impossible odds.

  J. R. R. Tolkien

  People, Impossible, Indomitable

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• To know that the odds are so high that only through the perishing of your life will the minions survive, that's love. That's heroism.

  Sylvester Stallone

  Hero, Minions, Perishing

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• Any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still know where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

  Douglas Adams

  Struggle, Winning, Men

  Douglas Adams (2012). “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The Trilogy of Five”, p.29, Pan Macmillan

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• I like to be against the odds. I'm not afraid to be lonely at the top. With me, it's just the satisfaction of the game. Just performance.

  Barry Bonds

  Lonely, Games, Satisfaction

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• The ordinary person senses the greatness of the odds against him even without thought or analysis, and he adapts his attitudes unconsciously. A huge passivity has settled on industrial society. For people carried about in mechanical vehicles, earning their living by waiting on machines, listening much of the waking day to canned music, watching packaged movie entertainment and capsulated news, for such people it would require an exceptional degree of awareness and an especial heroism of effort to be anything but supine consumers of processed goods.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Attitude, Greatness, People

  "The Mechanical Bride : Folklore of Industrial Man" by Marshall McLuhan, (p. 21), 1951.

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• I have not survived against all odds. I have not lived to tell. I have not witnessed the extraordinary. This is my story.

  Amy Krouse Rosenthal

  Stories, Extraordinary, Survived

  Amy Krouse Rosenthal (2007). “Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life”, p.6, Broadway Books

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• I examined my Liberalism and found it like an addiction to roulette. Here, though the odds are plain, and the certainty of loss apparent to anyone with a knowledge of arithmetic, the addict, failing time and again, is convinced he yet is graced with the power to contravene natural laws. The roulette addict, when he invariably comes to grief, does not examine either the nature of roulette, or of his delusion, but retires to develop a new system, and to scheme for more funds.

  David Mamet

  Grief, Loss, Law

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• Living as if the world out there were somehow separate from us opens the door to the belief system of judgement and the chemical expressions of that judgment in our bodies. Thus we tend to see our world in terms of good germs and bad germs, and use words such as toxins and waste to describe the by-products of the very functions that give us life. It is in such a world that our bodies may become a combat zone for forces at odds with one another, creating the biological battlegrounds that play out

  Gregg Braden

  Our World, Doors, Expression

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• The gratitude of every home in our Island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world, except in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the World War by their prowess and by their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

  Winston Churchill

  Gratitude, War, Home

  Speech in House of Commons, 20 Aug. 1940

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• What odds does it make to the man who lives within Nature's bounds, whether he ploughs a hundred acres or a thousand?

  Horace

  Men, Doe, Acres

  "Satires". Book by Horace, Book I, satire i, line 48, c. 35 BC.

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• When you consider all the writers who never even had a machine. Who would have given an eyeball for a good typewriter. Any typewriter. All the ones who wrote on a matchbook covers. Paper bags. Toilet paper. Who had their writing destroyed by their jailers. Who persisted beyond all odds.

  Sam Shepard

  Writing, Typewriters, Bags

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• I am beginning to think of the human imagination as a fruit machine on which victories are rare and separated by much vain expense, and represent a rare alignment of mental and spiritual qualities that normally are quite at odds.

  Philip Larkin

  Spiritual, Thinking, Imagination

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• You'd better discover a more important motive than publication for your work or else you'll go crazy. My sense is that you'll be writers only if you are convinced that to write is something for which there is no substitute in your life. You must therefore be ambitious for your work rather than for its promotion. The good news here is that if you assign secondary importance to publishing and primary to writing itself, you will write better, and will thus increase your odds of getting publishing.

  Sydney Lea

  Crazy, Writing, Important

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• I ran for the presidency, despite hopeless odds, to demonstrate the sheer will and refusal to accept the status quo.

  Shirley Chisholm

  Running, Voice, White

  "The Good Fight". Book by Shirley Chisholm, 1973.

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• The fundamental problem with golf is that every so often, no matter how lacking you may be in the essential virtues required of a steady player, the odds are that one day you will hit the ball straight, hard, and out of sight. This is the essential frustration of this excruciating sport. For when you've done it once, you make the fundamental error of asking yourself why you can't do this all the time. The answer to this question is simple: the first time was a fluke.

  Colin Falconer

  Sports, Golf, Frustration

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