Path Dependence Quotes

I keep telling you the future isn't set in stone. It's not all decided yet. The future is just what's down the road we decided to walk on today. You can change roads anytime. And that changes where you end up.

It just worries me that if we start trying to erase history that we can learn from, where does that end? Do you start taking away books people find offensive? It's just a path that seems very dangerous to me in this country.

Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why, and your decision persists by the power of inertia. Every year it gets harder to change.

An elephant always puts his foot into the hole which another elephant's foot has made so that a frequented track is nothing but a series of pits filled with mud and water.

Belief like any other moving body follows the path of least resistance.

No system disappears quickly because habits live on.

The tragic evils of our life are so commonly unintentional. We did not start out for that poor, cheap goal. That aim was not in our minds at all....Look to the road you are walking on. He who picks up one end of [a] stick picks up the other.He who chooses the beginning of a road chooses the place it leads to.

In case you never noticed, the path you never chose has chosen you.

It amazes me how easy it is for things to change, how easy it is to start off down the same road you always take and wind up somewhere new. Just one false step, one pause, one detour, and you end up with new friends or a bad reputation or a boyfriend or a breakup. It's never occurred to me before; I've never been able to see it. And it makes me feel, weirdly, like maybe all of these different possibilities exist at the same time, like each moment we live has a thousand other moments layered underneath it that look different.

Show us not the aim without the way. For ends and means on earth are so entangled That changing one, you change the other too; Each different path brings other ends in view

When the movie 'Sliding Doors' came out, it almost sent me into existential crisis because I think about that all the time. Like, 'Wait. If I left my house five minutes later, maybe this would have happened and I'd be on this different track of my life. How would that affect me?'

My own conclusion is that history is simply social development along the lines of weakest resistance, and that in most cases the line of weakest resistance is found as unconsciously by society as by water.

Sometimes you imagine that everything could have been different for you, that if only you had gone right one day when you chose to go left, you would be living a life you could never have anticipated. But at other times you think there was no other way forward--that you were always bound to end up exactly where you have.

It is often by a trivial, even an anecdotal decision, that we direct our activities into a certain channel, and thus determine which of the potential expressions of our individuality become manifest. Usually we know nothing of the ultimate orientation or of the outlet toward which we travel, and the stream sweeps us to a formula of life from which there is no returning. Every decision is like a murder, and our march forward is over the stillborn bodies of all our possible selves that will never be.

I kind of want to continue to fail, because it's easier for me to think of what I want to do next. Whereas if I succeed I might have to follow that path.

The potential of any technology is always dissipated by its users involvement in its predecessors...Computer are still serving mainly to sustain precomputer effects.

I have come to an odd belief, which is that we don't make decisions so much as the decisions make us. The goal of a decision isn't just to find the path forward, but to become someone entirely different than who we might have been as a function of the path we take.

Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere; I would be different.

If I hadn't done this I might have ended up digging the roads.

Where I'm at now is awesome. A different road might have led me to a different place, and I wouldn't be happy doing anything but music.

Things are the way they are because they were the way they were.

You know, when you've established a certain thing, what can you do? You're stuck with it.

Even if we could turn back, we'd probably never end up where we started.

One day through the primeval wood A calf walked home as good calves should; But made a trail all bent askew, A crooked trail as all calves do. . . . . And men two centuries and a half Trod in the footsteps of that calf.

Decisions that lawmakers made decades or even a century ago have essentially locked us into ways of doing things, as the cost of changing looms more heavily than the potential benefits of trying something different.