Improbability Quotes

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

The problem of synchronicity has puzzled me for a long time, ever since the middle twenties, when I was investigating the phenomena of the collective unconscious and kept on coming across connections which I simply could not explain as chance groupings or "runs." What I found were "coincidences" which were connected so meaningfully that their "chance" concurrence would represent a degree of improbability that would have to be expressed by an astronomical figure.

We cannot prove that there is no God, but we can safely conclude the He is very, very improbable indeed.

Things never happen the same way twice.

The importance of information is directly proportional to its improbability.

If we do everything right, if we do it with absolute certainty, there's still a 30% chance we're going to get it wrong.

On Earth, among millions of lineages or organisms and perhaps 50 billion speciation events, only one led to high intelligence ; this makes me believe its utter improbablity.

Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one. But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.

Matter-of-fact descriptions make the improbable seem real.

I have figured for you the distance between the horns of a dilemma, night and day, and A and Z. I have computed how far is Up, how long it takes to get Away, and what becomes of Gone. I have discovered the length of the sea serpent, the price of priceless, and the square of the hippopotamus. I know where you are when you are at Sixes and Sevens, how much Is you have to have to make an Are, and how many birds you can catch with the salt in the ocean - 187,796,132, if it would interest you.

The important point is that since the origin of life belongs in the category of at-least-once phenomena, time is on its side. However improbable we regard this event, or any of the steps which it involves, given enough time it will almost certainly happen at least once. And for life as we know it, with its capacity for growth and reproduction, once may be enough.

That sounded about as likely as Apophis and Ra becoming Facebook buddies, but I decided not to say anything.

And tomorrow--who knows what happens? Do you get it? I don't know and no one knows--it's all unknown! You understand, that this is the end to the Known? This is the new, the improbable, the unpredictable.

Don’t ignore planning for unlikely events. Over long periods of time the highly improbable gets more probable to occur at least once.

Something that never happens anywhere at any time.

The pathways that have led to our evolution are quirky, improbable, unrepeatable and utterly unpredictable.

There is as much chance of a Russo-German agreement as me being elected President of the Chamber of Commerce.

It is likely that unlikely things should happen

Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability

Really, some of the best 'X-Files' stories come right out of science. And you just apply that 'what-if' idea. Oh, what if this were true? And that's why so many times the show is scarier because it was not necessarily improbable.

Just think of all the billions of coincidences that don't happen.

Justice can send water back uphill.

To be without God is to be a snake / who wants to swallow an elephant.

Any entity capable of intelligently designing something as improbable as Dutchman's Pipe (or a universe) would have to be even more improbable than a Dutchman's Pipe. Far from terminating the vicious regress, God aggravates it with a vengeance.