Contingency Quotes - Page 3

• We will build a Marine Corps based on 36 battalions, which the Heritage Foundation notes is the minimum needed to deal with major contingencies. Right now we only have 23.

  Donald Trump

  Marine, Foundation, Heritage

  Source: www.rushlimbaugh.com

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• To anticipate and prevent disasterous contingencies would be the part of wisdom and patriotism.

  George Washington

  Would Be, Anticipate

  Letter to John Jay, August 15, 1786.

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• The war on terror, rebranded under Obama as the "Overseas Contingency Operation," has morphed into war on democracy.

  Henry Giroux

  War, Democracy, Operations

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• Kripke says that physicalists like me can't explain the 'apparent contingency' of mind-brain identities. He maintains that, if I really believed that pains are C-fibres, then I ought no longer to have any room for the thought that 'they' might come apart. His argument is that, since pains aren't identified via some contingent description, but in terms of how they feel, I have no good way of constructing a possible world, so to speak, where C-fibres are present yet pains absent.

  David Papineau

  Pain, Brain, Mind

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• Those who insist that a Church program exist for every contingency and need are as much in error as their counterparts who demand that government intervene in every aspect of our lives. In both instances the ideal balance is destroyed with a resultant detriment to human progress.

  Dean L. Larsen

  Errors, Government, Balance

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• I mean, the radical contingency that is - that exists and the fact that I'm going into the streets and finding random strangers any given day - who's in these streets that day?

  Kehinde Wiley

  Mean, Facts, Stranger

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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• The very essence of civilized culture is that we deliberately institute, in advance of the happening of various contingencies and emergencies of life, devices for detecting their approach and registering their nature, for warding off what is unfavorable or at least for protecting ourselves from its full impact.

  Dale Jamieson

  Impact, Essence, Culture

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• From our limited vantage point, our lives are marked by an endless series of contingencies. We frequently find ourselves, instead of acting as we planned, reacting to an unexpected turn of events. We make plans but are often forced to change those plans. But there are no contingencies with God. Our unexpected, forced change of plans is a part of His plan. God is never surprised; never caught off guard; never frustrated by unexpected developments. God does as He pleases and that which pleases Him is always for His glory and our good.

  Jerry Bridges

  Frustrated, Acting, Events

  Jerry Bridges (2016). “Trusting God”, p.47, NavPress

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• There is nearly always uh, a process of wanting contingency plans made in the military.

  McGeorge Bundy

  Military, Made, Process

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• There is no evolutionary pressure to create minds capable of forming sciences; it just happened. Evolutionary pressure has not led to higher rates of reproduction for people capable of solving scientific problems or creating new scientific ideas. So if, in fact, the science-forming capacities evolved for other reasons, it would not be too surprising if those particular structures that have developed proved to be rather special in their nature, reflecting the contingencies of their evolution or the working of physical law.

  Noam Chomsky

  Law, Ideas, Creating

  Source: chomsky.info

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• I view the major features of my own odyssey as a set of mostly fortunate contingencies. I was not destined by inherited mentality or family tradition to become a paleontologist. I can locate no tradition for scientific or intellectual careers anywhere on either side of my eastern European Jewish background. I view my serious and lifelong commitment to baseball in entirely the same manner: purely as a contingent circumstance of numerous, albeit not entirely capricious, accidents.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Baseball, Commitment, Views

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• Certainly, I know what to do, and when I am Vice President -- and I will be -- there will be contingency plans under different sets of situations and I tell you what, I'm not going to go out and hold a news conference about it. I'm going to put it in a safe and keep it there! Does that answer your question?

  Dan Quayle

  President, Safe, Politics

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• Yet Gotama's Dhamma is more than just a series of axioms. It is to be lived rather than simply adopted and believed in. It entails that one embrace this world in all its contingency and specificity, with all its ambiguity and flaws.

  Stephen Batchelor

  World, Flaws, Embrace

  Stephen Batchelor (2010). “Confession of a Buddhist Atheist”, p.246, Spiegel & Grau

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• But [in bureaucracies], too, decision making takes place in a world full of unceratinties. Any actual system of information processing, planning and control will never be optimal but merely practical, applying rote responses to recurrent problems and employing a variety of contingency tactics to deal with unforeseen events.

  Manuel De Landa

  Information Processing, Decision, Events

  Manuel De Landa (1997). “A thousand years of nonlinear history”, Zone Books (NY)

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• Fiction, with its preference for what is small and might elsewhere seem irrelevant; its facility for smuggling us into another skin and allowing us to live a new life there; its painstaking devotion to what without it might go unnoticed and unseen; its respect for contingency, and the unlikely and odd; its willingness to expose itself to moments of low, almost animal being and make them nobly illuminating, can deliver truths we might not otherwise stumble on.

  David Malouf

  Animal, Skins, Unseen

  David Malouf (2011). “The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World”, p.87, Black Inc.

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• You can get far in North America with laconic grunts. "Huh," "hun," and "hi!" in their various modulations, together with "sure," "guess so," "that so?" and "nuts!" will meet almost any contingency.

  Ian Fleming

  Nuts, America, Together

  Ian Fleming (2012). “For Your Eyes Only”, Vintage Digital

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• It may safely be received as an axiom in our political system, that the state governments will in all possible contingencies afford complete security against invasions of the public liberty by the national authority.

  Alexander Hamilton

  Government, Political, Liberty

  Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay (2016). “The Federalist Papers and the Constitution of the United States: The Principles of the American Government”, p.151, Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

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• He is always becoming, and if it were not for the contingency of death, he would never end.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Becoming, Ends, Ifs

  Jean-Paul Sartre, Lloyd Alexander (1964). “Nausea”, p.13, New Directions Publishing

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• One thing that I am sure of, and which I can answer truthfully, is that whatever the contingencies that may arise here, wherever I am there will be no communism.

  Francisco Franco

  Answers, May, Communism

  "Francisco Franco : The Times and the Man" by Joaquin Arraras, (p. 159), 1938.

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• Luck enters into every contingency. You are a fool if you forget it -- and a greater fool if you count upon it.

  Phyllis Bottome

  Luck, Fool, Forget

  Phyllis Bottome (1954). “The Secret Stair”

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• what are you looking for? There is no Truth. There's only action, action obeying a million different impulses, ephemeral action, action subjected to every possible and imaginable contingency and contradiction, Life. Life is crime, theft, jealousy, hunger, lies, disgust,stupidity, sickness, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, piles of corpses. what can you do about it, my poor friend?

  Blaise Cendrars

  Jealousy, Lying, Volcanoes

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• It was Darwin's chief contribution, not only to Biology but to the whole of natural science, to have brought to light a process by which contingencies a priori improbable, are given, in the process of time, an increasing probability, until it is their non-occurrence rather than their occurrence which becomes highly improbable.

  Ronald Fisher

  Science, Light, Evolution

  "Evolution as a Process". Book edited by J. S. Huxley, A. C. Hardy and E. B. Ford, 1954.

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• Outward objects cannot take hold of the soul, nor force their passage into her, nor set any of her wheels going. No, the impression comes from herself, and it is her own motions which affect her. As for the contingencies of fortune, they are either great or little, according to the opinion she has of her own strength.

  Marcus Aurelius

  Soul, Littles, Wheels

  Marcus Aurelius (Emperor of Rome) (1887). “The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius”

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• It is preposterous to suppose that the people of one generation can lay down the best and only rules of government for all who are to come after them, and under unforeseen contingencies.

  Ulysses S. Grant

  Government, People, Generations

  Ulysses S. Grant (2007). “Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant”, p.80, Cosimo, Inc.

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• The vanity of existence is revealed in the whole form existence assumes: in the infiniteness of time and space contrasted with the finiteness of the individual in both; in the fleeting present as the sole form in which actuality exists; in the contingency and relativity of all things; in continual becoming without being; in continual desire without satisfaction; in the continual frustration of striving of which life consists. . . Time is that by virtue of which everything becomes nothingness in our hands and loses all real value.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Real, Frustration, Vanity

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