I tell people: if it's in the news, don't worry about it, because by definition, news is something that almost never happens.
I'm not sure if you can blame everything on the American way of life, but the United States are big. So, if you have a lot of people there, the percentage of stupid people is bound to be higher.
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.
Remember, in China when you are one in a million, there are 1,300 other people just like you.
The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle.
Investing is a probabilistic business. Every once in a while, it's sort of like you're throwing six-sided dice, and anything except a one or a two, you're doing well. Statistically speaking, you throw the dice enough times, you're going to throw a one or a two five times in a row, and you're going to look pretty foolish, right?
Why are atoms so small? ... Many examples have been devised to bring this fact home to an audience, none of them more impressive than the one used by Lord Kelvin: Suppose that you could mark the molecules in a glass of water, then pour the contents of the glass into the ocean and stir the latter thoroughly so as to distribute the marked molecules uniformly throughout the seven seas; if you then took a glass of water anywhere out of the ocean, you would find in it about a hundred of your marked molecules.
The air in a man's lungs 10,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000 atoms, so that sooner or later every one of us breathes an atom that has been breathed before by anyone you can think of who has ever lived - Michelangelo or George Washington or Moses.
We don't know why we are here and the context of our role in the universe, and the thought of an infinite universe. It's something the human mind can't really grasp. It's statistically impossible that there's not life on other planets.
If you make the same guess often enough it ceases to be a guess and becomes a Scientific Fact. This is the inductive method.
I read that MTV's Real World got 40,000 applications. That's amazing, such an even number. You would have thought it would be 40,008.
I'm probably taller than 90% of the men I meet.
In any long string of letters, one can find countless anomalies that will seem like convincing proofs of hidden meaning to the mind that wants to believe that the text is somehow special. Numerological tricks, for example, can demonstrate that William Shakespeare wrote the 'King James Bible.'
Having no unusual coincidence is far more unusual than any coincidence could possibly be.
Must be a different Larry Wall. There are at least 137 of us in the U.S.
If you write 50 songs, you're bound to write at least a dozen good ones.
If I get that thing down there in that area, that's 67% lifetime. If you don't believe me, Google it. I'm on the Internet.
Knox was engaged in a theological discussion with scientist John Scott Haldane. 'In a universe containing millions of planets,' reasoned Haldane, 'is it not inevitable that life should appear on at least one of them?' 'Sir,' replied Knox, 'if Scotland Yard found a body in your cabin trunk, would you tell them: 'There are millions of trunks in the world; surely one of them must contain a body? I think the would still want to know who put it there'.
Chance ... must be something more than the name we give to our ignorance.
The probability of ten consecutive heads is 0.1 percent; thus, when you have millions of coin tossers, or investors, in the end there will be thousands of very successful practitioners of coin tossing, or stock picking.
Other people's risks are statistical. When it's your risk, your own child, it isn't statistical anymore.
Fellas, it's all a numbers game. The more women you meet, the greater chance you have of finding the right one.
If one puts an infinite number of monkeys in front of typewriters, and lets them clap away, there is a certainty that one of them will come out with an exact version of the 'Iliad.'
I tried marriage. I'm 0 for 3 with the marriage thing. So, being a ballplayer - I believe in numbers. I'm not going 0 for 4. I'm not wearing a golden sombrero.
No isolated experiment, however significant in itself, can suffice for the experimental demonstration of any natural phenomenon; for the "one chance in a million" will undoubtedly occur, with no less and no more than its appropriate frequency, however surprised we may be that it should occur to us.
