Probability Quotes - Page 20

• We cannot live on probabilities. The faith in which we can live bravely and die in peace must be a certainty, so far as it professes to be a faith at all, or it is nothing.

  James Anthony Froude

  Faith, Peace, Certainty

  James Anthony Froude (1868). “Short Studies on Great Subjects”, p.193

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• If to enjoy even an enjoyable present we must have the assurance of a happy future, we are “crying for the moon.” We have no such assurance. The best predictions are still matters of probability rather than certainty, and to the best of our knowledge every one of us is going to suffer and die. If, then, we cannot live happily without an assured future, we are certainly not adapted to living in a finite world where, despite the best plans, accidents will happen, and where death comes at the end.

  Alan Watts

  Moon, Suffering, World

  Alan Watts (1951). “The Wisdom of Insecurity”, Vintage

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• The consequences of an act affect the probability of its occurring again.

  B. F. Skinner

  Consequence

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• At one time, the earth was supposed to be flat. Well, so it is, even today, from Paris to Asnieres. But that fact doesn't prevent science from proving that the earth as a whole is spherical. No one nowadays denies it. Well...we are still at the stage of believing that life itself is flat, the distance from birth to death. Yet the probability is that life, too, is spherical and much more extensive and capacious than the hemisphere we know.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  Distance, Believe, Paris

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• The principle of [divine] purpose... stares the biologist in the face wherever he looks... The probability for such an event as the origin of DNA molecules to have occurred by sheer chance is just too small to be seriously considered.

  Ernst Boris Chain

  Dna, Faces, Principles

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• Religious faith depends on a host of social, psychological and emotional factors that have little or nothing to do with probabilities, evidence and logic.

  Michael Shermer

  Faith, Religious, Emotional

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• A Resource-Based Economy is in the application of the methods of science with human concern and environmental concern. If we used the scientific method throughout the world, the probability of war drops to zero. The probability of human suffering disappears. Deprivation, poverty, crime - all those things tend to disappear because there's no basis. I'm strictly concerned with the environment that people are raised in and if that environment is altered, so will behaviors be altered.

  Jacque Fresco

  Zero, War, People

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