Probability Quotes - Page 16

• The photographer, like an acrobat, must defy the laws of probability or even of possibility; at the limit, he must defy those of the interesting: the photograph becomes surprising when we do not know why it has been taken.

  Roland Barthes

  Taken, Law, Interesting

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• Failure to meditate in the morning increases the probability of chaos throughout the day.

  Joe Sacco

  Morning, Chaos, Increase

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• Take a dose of medicine once, and in all probability you will be obliged to take an additional hundred afterwards

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  Medicine, Hundred, Dose

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• When a person feels disposed to over estimate his own importance, let him remember that mankind got along very well before his birth, and that in all probability they will they will get along very well after his death.

  Charles Simmons

  Birth, Remember, Importance

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• It is, I believe, justifiable to make the generalization that anything an organic chemist can synthesize can be made without him. All he does is increase the probability that given reactions will 'go.' So it is quite reasonable to assume that given sufficient time and proper conditions, nucleotides, amino acids, proteins, and nucleic acids will arise by reactions that, though less probable, are as inevitable as those by which the organic chemist fulfills his predictions. So why not self-duplicating virus-like systems capable of further evolution?

  George Wells Beadle

  Believe, Science, Self

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• Fame, we may understand, is no sure test of merit, but only a probability of such; it is an accident, not a property of man.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Men, May, Tests

  Thomas Carlyle (1864). “Critical and Miscellaneous Essays ...”, p.75

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• In some ways more painful is the fact that their experience appears to be fading from the collective memory of humankind. Having never experienced an atomic bombing, the vast majority around the world can only vaguely imagine such horror, and these days, John Hersey's Hiroshima and Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth are all but forgotten. As predicted by the saying, 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,' the probability that nuclear weapons will be used and the danger of nuclear war are increasing.

  Tadatoshi Akiba

  Memories, War, Fate

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• Do not mistake probability for truth, for it is a notorious liar.

  Robert Breault

  Truth, Mistake, Liars

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• Trust a witness in all matters in which neither his self-interest, his passions, his prejudices, nor the love of the marvellous is strongly concerned. When they are involved, require corroborative evidence in exact proportion to the contravention of probability by the thing testified.

  Thomas Huxley

  Passion, Self, Prejudice

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• Use this day to do something daring, extraordinary and unlike yourself. Take a chance and shape a different pattern in your personal cloud of probability!

  Vera Nazarian

  Clouds, Patterns, Different

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• Philosophy goes no further than probabilities, and in every assertion keeps a doubt in reserve.

  James Anthony Froude

  Philosophy, Doubt, Philosopher

  Short Studies on Great Subjects Calvinism (p. 51)

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• Crushed to earth and rising again is an author's gymnastic. Once he fails to struggle to his feet and grab his pen, he will contemplate a fact he should never permit himself to face: that in all probability books have been written, are being written, will be written, better than anything he has done, is doing, or will do.

  Fannie Hurst

  Perseverance, Struggle, Book

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• Results rarely specify their causes unambiguously. If we have no direct evidence of fossils or human chronicles, if we are forced to infer a process only from its modern results, then we are usually stymied or reduced to speculation about probabilities. For many roads lead to almost any Rome.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Rome, Fossils, Causes

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History”, p.34, W. W. Norton & Company

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• I regard this conclusion as coming in the same sort of category, of historical probability so high as to be virtually certain, as the death of Augustus in AD 14 or the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70

  N. T. Wright

  Fall, Historical, Jerusalem

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• The road is a strange place. Shuffling along, I looked up and you were there walking across the grass toward my truck on an August day. In retrospect, it seems inevitable - it could not have been any other way-- a case of what I call the high probability of the improbable

  Robert James Waller

  August, Strange Places, Retrospect

  The Bridge of Madison County (pp. 22-3)

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• In all probability an outburst of desperation in the midst of general submissiveness will always help.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Helping, Desperation, Midst

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• Labeling and diagnosis is a catastrophic way to communicate. Telling other people what's wrong with them greatly reduces, almost to zero, the probability that we're going to get what we're after.

  Marshall B. Rosenberg

  Zero, Communication, People

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• Given our inevitably incomplete knowledge about key structural aspects of our ever-changing economy and the sometimes asymmetric costs or benefits of particular outcomes, a central bank... need to consider not only the most likely future path for the economy but also the distribution of possible outcomes about that path. They then need to reach a judgment about the probabilities, costs, and benefits of the various possible outcomes under alternative choices for policy.

  Alan Greenspan

  Keys, Incomplete Knowledge, Choices

  "Monetary Policy under Uncertainty". Alan Greenspan's Remarks At a symposium sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, www.federalreserve.gov. August 29, 2003.

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• People are entirely too disbelieving of coincidence. They are far too ready to dismiss it and to build arcane structures of extremely rickety substance in order to avoid it. I, on the other hand, see coincidence everywhere as an inevitable consequence of the laws of probability, according to which having no unusual coincidence is far more unusual than any coincidence could possibly be.

  Isaac Asimov

  Science, Hands, Order

  Isaac Asimov (1976). “The planet that wasn't”, Doubleday Books

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• Even if we could be certain that one of the world's religions were perfectly true, given the sheer number of conflicting faiths on offer, every believer should expect damnation purely as a matter of probability.

  Bertrand Russell

  Numbers, Religion, World

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• Probability is not about the odds, but about the belief in the existence of an alternative outcome, cause, or motive.

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  Odds, Alternatives, Outcomes

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2007). “Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets”, p.224, Penguin UK

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• We continue to adhere to a common-sense view of risk - how much we can lose and the probability of losing it. While this perspective may seem over simplisticor even hopelessly outdated, we believe it provides a vital clarity about the true risks in investing.

  Seth Klarman

  Believe, Views, Common Sense

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• If Death stepped miraculously through the glass and came in after you, in all probability you just got up and went along with him, ferociously but quietly.

  J. D. Salinger

  Death, Glasses, Ifs

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• Anyone who dares to speak about an aether is regarded as an ignorant and backward mind and he can only lose his credibility in scientific circles, although in reality those who criticize him use the same concept of intermediate medium in other words, whether it be fields, an associated fluid, a probability fluid, a pilot fluid, a quantum fluid, etc.

  Maurice Allais

  Reality, Circles, Ignorant

  "L'anisotropie de l'espace. La nécessaire révision de certains postulats des théories contemporaines. Les données de l'expérience" by Maurice Allais, Clément Juglar, Paris, (p. 506), 1997.

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• Generally, a betting system for which each wager depends only on present resources and present probability of success is known as a Markov betting system.

  Richard Arnold Epstein

  Wagers, Resources, Betting

  "The Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic, Revised Edition". Book by Richard Arnold Epstein, Chapter Three, Fundamental Principles Of A Theory Of Gambling, 1977.

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