Randomness Quotes

Chance gives rise to thoughts, and chance removes them; no art can keep or acquire them.

I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston phone book than the faculty of Harvard University.

A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces of a Boeing 747, dismembered and in disarray. A whirlwind happens to blow through the yard. What is the chance that after its passage a fully assembled 747, ready to fly, will be found standing there? So small as to be negligible, even if a tornado were to blow through enough junkyards to fill the whole Universe.

To exist without purpose is to be at the mercy of the chance encounter, the chance invitation, the chance phone call, the chance event- always being controlled by forces external to oneself.

The rain ...falls upon the just and the unjust alike; a thing which would not happen if I were superintending the rain's affairs.

Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.

Life will always remain a gamble, with prizes sometimes for the imprudent, and blanks so often to the wise.

The world becomes an apparently infinite, yet possibly finite, card game. Image combinations, permutations, comprise the world game.

In infinite space, even the most unlikely events must take place somewhere.

I think you should always bear in mind that entropy is not on your side.

Coincidences, in general, are great stumbling-blocks in the way of that class of thinkers who have been educated to know nothing of the theory of probabilities.

Our revolution has made me feel the full force of the axiom that history is fiction and I am convinced that chance and intrigue have produced more heroes than genius and virtue.

Love is like a virus. It can happen to anybody at any time.

When a coincidence seems amazing, that's because the human mind isn’t wired to naturally comprehend probability & statistics.

But the indeterminate future is somehow one in which probability and statistics are the dominant modality for making sense of the world. Bell curves and random walks define what the future is going to look like. The standard pedagogical argument is that high schools should get rid of calculus and replace it with statistics, which is really important and actually useful. There has been a powerful shift toward the idea that statistical ways of thinking are going to drive the future.

Life cannot be calculated. That's the big mistake our civilization made. We never accepted that randomness is not a mistake in the equation -- it is part of the equation.

It was the damnedest thing, life. Once you decide exactly how things are going to go, something or someone comes along and messes it all up.

Everything happens for a reason, but that doesn't mean there's a point.

Chaos is the score upon which reality is written.

History is much more the product of chaos than of conspiracy.

How dare we speak of the laws of chance? Is not chance the antithesis of all law?

If you want to make god laugh, make a plan.

I was born accidentally. I lived accidentally in London. We nearly migrated to New Zealand. So much of my life has been a product of chance, I can't see a meaning in it at all.

For what are myths if not the imposing of order on phenomena that do not possess order in themselves? And all myths, however they differ from philosophical systems and scientific theories, share this with them, that they negate the principle of randomness in the world.