Probability Quotes - Page 13

• One: demonstrations always crash. And two: the probability of them crashing goes up exponentially with the number of people watching.

  Steve Jobs

  Two, Numbers, People

  12 Copy quote

• An easterly is the most disagreeable wind in Lyme Bay — Lyme Bay being that largest bite from the underside of England's outstretched southwestern leg — and a person of curiosity could at once have deduced several strong probabilities about the pair who began to walk down the quay at Lyme Regis, the small but ancient eponym of the inbite, one incisively sharp and blustery morning in the late March of 1867.

  John Fowles

  Strong, Morning, Wind

  JOHN FOWLES (1969). “THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN”

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Every company needs to have a skunkworks, to try things that have a high probability of failing. You try to minimize failure, but at the same time, if you're not willing to try things that are inherently risky, you're not going to make progress.

  Nolan Bushnell

  Progress, Trying, Needs

  "Q&A: Atari Founder Nolan Bushnell on Innovation, the “Next Steve Jobs” and Why Mobile Games Are “Over”". Interview with Eric Johnson, allthingsd.com. March 26, 2013.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Certainty is not biologically possible. We must learn (and teach our children) to tolerate the unpleasantness of uncertainty. Science has given us the language and tools of probabilities. We have methods for analyzing and ranking opinion according to their likelihood of correctness. That is enough.

  Robert A. Burton

  Children, Humility, Tools

  9 Copy quote

• I've debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man.

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  Fall, Men, Gym Rats

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2012). “Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder”, p.245, Random House

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• ROMANCE, n. Fiction that owes no allegiance to the God of Things as They Are. In the novel the writer's thought is tethered to probability, but in romance it ranges at will over the entire region of the imagination . . .

  Ambrose Bierce

  Imagination, Romance, Fiction

  Ambrose Bierce (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Illustrated)”, p.2504, Delphi Classics

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• When it looks like the sun isn't going to shine any more, God puts a rainbow in the clouds. Each one of us has the possibility, the responsibility, the probability to be the rainbow in the clouds.

  Maya Angelou

  Responsibility, Clouds, Rainbow

  9 Copy quote

• It is a well-known fact that in countries in which the national debt is properly funded, and an object of established confidence, it answers most of the purposes of money. Transfers of stock, or public debt, are there equivalent to payments in specie; or, in other words, stock, in the principal transactions of business, passes current as specie. The same thing would, in all probability, happen here, under the like circumstances.

  Alexander Hamilton

  Country, Purpose, Debt

  Alexander Hamilton, Lyndon LaRouche (2016). “The Vision of Hamilton: Hamilton's 4 Reports and LaRouche's 4 Laws”, p.10, Executive Intelligence Review

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Take the probability of loss times the amount of possible loss from the probability of gain times the amount of possible gain. That is what we're trying to do. It's imperfect, but that's what it's all about.

  Warren Buffett

  Loss, Trying, Gains

  35 Copy quote

• Mrs. Boffin, insisting that Bella should make tomorrow's expedition in the chariot, she went home in great grandeur. Mrs. Wilfer and Miss Lavinia had speculated much on the probabilities and improbabilities of her coming in this gorgeous state, and, on beholding the chariot from the window at which they were secreted to look out for it, agreed that it must be detained at the door as long as possible, for the mortification and confusion of the neighbours.

  Charles Dickens

  Funny, Humorous, Home

  Charles Dickens (2006). “Our Mutual Friend: Easyread Edition”, p.26, ReadHowYouWant.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Hope does not always require probability.

  John Perry Barlow

  Doe

  15 Copy quote

• If you have the feeling of choice, if you feel free, you will be better off. And when I say better off I mean that if people feel they have control over their lives, they call in for fewer sick days from work. They have a lesser probability of having a heart attack or stroke. They live longer. They're happier.

  Sheena Iyengar

  Heart, Mean, People

  5 Copy quote

• Any universe that could have preceded consciousness only existed in a probability state.

  Robert Lanza

  Consciousness, States, Universe

  Robert Lanza, Bob Berman (2013). “Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe”, p.123, BenBella Books, Inc.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Activity equals results. If you want to increase your success, increase your activity. Increase contact with customers. The more people you contact, the higher your sales will be because of the law of probabilities.

  Brian Tracy

  Law, People, Want

  9 Copy quote

• Probability but no truth, facility but no freedom--it is owing to these two fruits that the tree of knowledge cannot be confused with the tree of life.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Truth, Freedom, Confused

  6 Copy quote

• The probability that we face global warming caused by fossil fuels is now so overwhelming that it is legitimate to doubt the motives of those who deny it

  Adair Turner, Baron Turner of Ecchinswell

  Doubt, Fuel, Fossils

  6 Copy quote

• Much attention has been focused on the MMR shot itself, whereas in all probability it is a combination of the three factors listed above: the increasing number of vaccines, the large amount of mercury, and the inherent danger of the triple vaccine.....The MMR vaccine is also especially suspect because laboratories in England, Ireland, and Japan have found evidence of MMR vaccine viruses in the intestinal tracts of autistic children, but not in control group, non-autistic children.

  Bernard Rimland

  Children, Japan, Vaccines

  5 Copy quote

• But the stupidity which is common to all such "explanations" is, of course, simply that of proceeding as though the merits of a theory - such things as truth, or probability, or explanatory power - could not possibly be among the reasons for its currency.

  David Stove

  Stupidity, Libertarian, Merit

  David Stove (2013). “On Enlightenment”, p.17, Transaction Publishers

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• A thoughtful investment process contemplates both probability and payoffs and carefully considers where the consensus - as revealed by a price - may be wrong. Even though there are also some important features that make investing different than, say, a casino or the track, the basic idea is the same: you want the positive expected value on your side

  Michael Mauboussin

  Thoughtful, Your Side, Ideas

  7 Copy quote

• In far from equilibrium conditions, the concept of probability that underlies Boltzmann's order principle is no longer valid if the structures we observe do not correspond to a maximum of complexions

  Ilya Prigogine

  Order, Principles, Structure

  14 Copy quote

• The true power is in the imagination which dares to speculate upon that which is not yet. The imagination, backed by great expectations, can bring about almost any reality within the range of probabilities.

  Seth

  Reality, True Power, Expectations

  12 Copy quote

• It may be laid down as a general rule, that their confidence in and obedience to a government, will be commonly proportioned to the goodness or badness of its administration . . . . Various reasons have been suggested in the course of these papers, to induce a probability that the general government will be better administered than the particular governments.

  Alexander Hamilton

  Government, Paper, Federalism

  Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay (2014). “The Federalist Papers”, p.126, Courier Corporation

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Free yourself from the rigid conduct of tradition and open yourself to the new forms of probability.

  Hans Bender

  Free Yourself, Tradition, Form

  44 Copy quote

• The reality, as I have come to understand it, is that the future is not fixed, and that therefore it cannot be reliably predicted. Consciousness interacts with vast archetypal fields of possibility and probability. What actually happens is the result of the collision of both forces.

  Steven Forrest

  Reality, Fields, Consciousness

  23 Copy quote

• Nonetheless, it still remains true that as a set of cognitive beliefs, religious doctrines constitute a speculative hypothesis of an extremely low order of probability.

  Sidney Hook

  Religious, Atheist, Order

  Sidney Hook (1991). “The Quest for Being”

  12 Copy quote

  Show source