Contingency Quotes

• To ... not prepare is the greatest of crimes; to be prepared beforehand for any contingency is the greatest of virtues.

  Sun Tzu

  War, Virtue, Crime

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• By no amount of reasoning can we altogether eliminate all contingency from our world. Moreover, pure speculation alone will not enable us to get a determinate picture of the existing world. We must eliminate some of the conflicting possibilities, and this can be brought about only by experiment and observation.

  Morris Raphael Cohen

  Science, Our World, Conflict

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• One thing that makes it possible to be an optimist is if you have a contingency plan for when all hell breaks loose.

  Randy Pausch

  Worst Case Scenario, Risk, Management

  Randy Pausch, Jeffrey Zaslow (2008). “The last lecture”, Hyperion Books

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• There is little peace or comfort in life if we are always anxious as to future events. He that worries himself with the dread of possible contingencies will never be at rest.

  Samuel Johnson

  Life, Peace, Future

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• The world changed from having the determinism of a clock to having the contingency of a pinball machine.

  Heinz Pagels

  Machines, World, Clock

  Heinz R. Pagels (2012). “The Cosmic Code: Quantum Physics as the Language of Nature”, p.85, Courier Corporation

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• I believe that a person should take an affirmative outlook. There are always problems in life, old and new, uncertainties, and unexpected contingencies. The optimal way to deal with this is not to give up in despair, but to move ahead using the best intelligence and resources that we have to overcome adversity.

  Paul Kurtz

  Giving Up, Moving, Believe

  "Isn't Religion Weird? Quotations for Atheists". Book by Dave Lane (p. 117), August 8, 2008.

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• In the army we are drilled into execution and then supervision, to make sure everything goes the way you planned it. But there is another thing that we do in the military, that I think perhaps isn't done enough in corporate life: As soon as you have made that decision, you start on the contingency planning. Because there is, as we like to say, a thinking, breathing enemy out there, who is not going to let you do just what you want.

  Colin Powell

  Military, Army, Thinking

  Source: www.egonzehnder.com

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• And even, if circumstances required, a contingency plan for his contingency plan's contingency plan.

  Frank Beddor

  Circumstances, Plans, Ifs

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• Chance doesn't mean meaningless randomness, but historical contingency. This happens rather than that, and that's the way that novelty, new things, come about.

  John Polkinghorne

  Mean, Historical, Way

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• It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.

  Penelope Lively

  Everything Happens For A Reason, Choices, Seems

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• You can’t control every contingency. You have to accept that. Let it scare you. Trust that it’ll be okay anyway.

  Rick Riordan

  Scare, Accepting, Okay

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• Often think of the worst-case scenario, the "Eaten By Wolves" factor.

  Randy Pausch

  Thinking, Worst Case Scenario, Cases

  Randy Pausch, Jeffrey Zaslow (2008). “The last lecture”, Hyperion Books

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• The good lawyer is not the man who has an eye to every side and angle of contingency, and qualifies all his qualifications, but who throws himself on your part so heartily, that he can get you out of a scrape.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Eye, Men, Law

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1872). “Representative men. English traits. Conduct of life”, p.354

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• New terms used like, 'overseas contingency operation' instead of the word 'war' - that reflects a worldview that is out of touch with the enemy that we face. We can't spin our way out of this threat.

  Sarah Palin

  War, Enemy, Way

  Keynote Speech at the Inaugural Tea Party Convention, delivered 6 February 2010, Nashville, Tennessee

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• Freedom is the recognition of contingency.

  Richard Rorty

  Recognition

  Richard Rorty (1998). “Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers”, p.326, Cambridge University Press

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• Life, as the most ancient of all metaphors insists, is a journey; and the travel book, in its deceptive simulation of the journey's fits and starts, rehearses life's own fragmentation. More even than the novel, it embraces the contingency of things.

  Jonathan Raban

  Travel, Book, Journey

  Jonathan Raban (1987). “For love & money: writing, reading, travelling, 1969-1987”

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• The same contingencies of time and space that force a statesman or soldier to make decisions, impel the historian, though with less urgency, to make up his mind.

  Samuel Eliot Morison

  Space, Decision, Soldier

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• We are a fluke of nature, a quirk of evolution, a glorious contingency.

  Michael Shermer

  Flukes, Evolution, Quirks

  Michael Shermer (2003). “How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God”, p.706, Macmillan

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• A self is a repertoire of behavior appropriate to a given set of contingencies.

  B. F. Skinner

  Self, Behavior, Given

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• The skin is a variety of contingency: in it, through it, with it, the world and my body touch each other, the feeling and the felt, it defines their common edge. Contingency means common tangency: in it the world and the body intersect and caress each other. I do not wish to call the place in which I live a medium, I prefer to say that things mingle with each other and that I am no exception to that. I mix with the world which mixes with me. Skin intervenes between several things in the world and makes them mingle.

  Michel Serres

  Mean, Feelings, Wish

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• The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed - where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.

  Alex Kozinski

  Mistake, Gun, Rights

  "Ninth Circuit Confirms a 2nd Amendment Right to Carry" by Michael James Barton, www.nationalreview.com. February 14, 2014.

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• The new goddess contingency could not be erected until the God of heaven was utterly despoiled of his dominion over the sons of men, and in the room thereof a home-bred idol of self-sufficiency set up, and the world persuaded to worship it. But that the building climb no higher, let all men observe how the word of God overthrows this babylonian tower.

  John Owen

  Home, Son, Men

  John Owen (1852). “The works ...”, p.40

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• Play is a subset of voluntary behaviour involving a selective mechanism which reverses the usual contingencies of power so as to permit the subject a controllable and dialectical simulation of the moderately unmastered arousals and regulations of everyday life, in a way that is alternatively vivifying and euphoric.

  Brian Sutton-Smith

  Play, Everyday, Usual

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• [Y]ou will understand the game behind the curtain too well not to perceive the old trick of turning every contingency into a resource for accumulating force in the government.

  James Madison

  Government, Games, Resources

  James Madison (1867). “1794-1815”, p.7

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• The cause, then, philosophically speaking, is the sum total of the conditions, positive and negative, taken together; the whole of the contingencies of every description, which being realized, the consequent invariably follows.

  John Stuart Mill

  Taken, Science, Being Real

  John Stuart Mill (1858). “A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive: Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation”, p.200

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