Improbability Quotes

• So long, and thanks for all the fish.

  Douglas Adams

  Democracies Have, Long, Dolphins

  Douglas Adams (2009). “So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish”, Pan Macmillan

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• The importance of information is directly proportional to its improbability.

  Jerry Pournelle

  Life And Love, Information, Importance

  "Lucifer's Hammer". Book by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven, 1977.

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• Blind nature will nearly always select the most probable, but man can let the most improbable become actual.

  Hans Jonas

  Life, Nature, Men

  Hans Jonas, Lawrence Vogel (1996). “Mortality and Morality: A Search for Good After Auschwitz”, p.157, Northwestern University Press

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• We are the accidental result of an unplanned process ... the fragile result of an enormous concatenation of improbabilities, not the predictable product of any definite process.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Science, Evolution, Process

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• The more improbable the message, the less "compressible" it is, and the more bandwidth it requires. This is Shannon's point: the essence is its improbability.

  William Poundstone

  Essence, Messages, Shannon

  William Poundstone (2010). “Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street”, p.57, Macmillan

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• For existential mathematics, which does not exist, would probably propose this equation: the value of coincidence equals the degree of its improbability.

  Milan Kundera

  Degrees, Doe, Coincidence

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• I think that's the mother and father of all cop-outs. It's an honest scientific quest to discover where this apparent improbability comes from. Now [Francis] Collins says, "Well, God did it. And God needs no explanation because God is outside all this." Well, what an incredible evasion of the responsibility to explain. Scientists don't do that. Scientists say, "We're working on it. We're struggling to understand."

  Richard Dawkins

  Mother, Father, Struggle

  Source: inters.org

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• Simultaneous discovery is utterly commonplace, and it was only the rarity of scientists, not the inherent improbability of the phenomenon, that made it remarkable in the past. Scientists on the same road may be expected to arrive at the same destination, often not far apart.

  Peter Medawar

  Science, Past, Discovery

  Peter Brian Medawar (1996). “The Strange Case of the Spotted Mice and Other Classic Essays on Science”, p.49, Oxford University Press, USA

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• It’s the combination of improbability with an independently given pattern that discredits chance.

  William Lane Craig

  Patterns, Chance, Combination

  William Lane Craig, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (2003). “God?: A Debate between a Christian and an Atheist”, p.64, Oxford University Press

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• The miraculous is not extraordinary but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread. Whoever really has considered the lilies of the field or the birds of the air and pondered the improbability of their existence in this warm world within the cold and empty stellar distances will hardly balk at the turning of water into wine which was, after all, a very small miracle. We forget the greater and still continuing miracle by which water (with soil and sunlight) is turned into grapes.

  Wendell Berry

  Distance, Wine, Air

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• I have come to understand that the self, my self, is inherently sacred. By virtue of its own improbability, its own miracle, its own emergence. And so I lift up my head, and I bear my own witness, with affection and tenderness and respect. And in so doing, I sanctify myself with my own grace.

  Ursula Goodenough

  Self, Miracle, Grace

  "The Sacred Depths of Nature". Book by Ursula Goodenough, 1998.

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• Okay, look at it this way: if the evening news has a very high probability of being accurate, then it's highly improbable that they would inaccurately report the numbers chosen in the lottery. That counterbalances any improbability in the choosing of those numbers, so you're quite rational to believe in this highly improbable event.

  William Lane Craig

  Believe, Numbers, Events

  "The Case for Faith: A Journalist Investigates the Toughest Objections to Christianity". Book by Lee Strobel, 2000.

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• That our being should consist of two fundamental elements [physical and psychical] offers I suppose no greater inherent improbability than that it should rest on one only.

  Charles Scott Sherrington

  Science, Two, Fundamentals

  Charles Scott Sherrington (1950). “The Physical Basis of Mind: A Symposium”

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• The issue, as correctly emphasized by Carl Sagan, is the probability of the evolution of high intelligence and an electronic civilization on an inhabited world. Once we have life (and almost surely it will be very different from life on Earth), what is the probability of its developing a lineage with high intelligence? On Earth, among millions of lineages of organisms and perhaps 50 billion speciation events, only one led to high intelligence; this makes me believe in its utter improbability.

  Ernst Mayr

  Believe, Civilization, Issues

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• The improbability of a malicious story serves but to help forward the currency of it, because it increases the scandal. So that, in such instances, the world is like the pious St. Austin, who said he believed some things because they were absurd and impossible.

  Laurence Sterne

  Scandal, Austin, Stories

  Laurence Sterne (1803). “The works of Laurence Sterne, with a life of the author, written by himself”

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• The atheist, agnostic, or secularist ... should insist on the need to engage in a meaningful debate on the entire issue of the truth or falsity (or probability or improbability) of religious tenets, without being subject to accusations of impiety, immorality, impoliteness, or any of the other smokescreens used by the pious to deflect attention from the central issues at hand.

  S. T. Joshi

  Meaningful, Religious, Atheist

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• To get our universe, with all of its potential for complexities or any kind of potential for any kind of life-form, everything has to be precisely defined on this knife edge of improbability. [Y]ou have to see the hands of a creator who set the parameters to be just so because the creator was interested in something a little more complicated than random particles.

  Francis Collins

  Hands, Knives, Littles

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• Nature seems to exult in abounding radicality, extremism, anarchy. If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed. In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. ... No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe.

  Annie Dillard

  Nature, Believe, Judging

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• But there are times when men have serious thoughts, and it is at such times, when they begin to think, that they begin to doubt the truth of the Christian religion; and well they may, for it is too fanciful and too full of conjecture, inconsistency, improbability and irrationality, to afford consolation to the thoughtful man. His reason revolts against his creed. He sees that none of its articles are proved, or can be proved.

  Thomas Paine

  Christian, Men, Thinking

  Thomas Paine (1854). “The Works of Thomas Paine: A Hero in the American Revolution. With an Account of His Life ...”, p.260

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• What I can't understand is why you invoke improbability and yet you will not admit that you're shooting yourself in the foot by postulating something just as improbable, magicking into existence the word God.

  Richard Dawkins

  Feet, Shooting, Existence

  Source: inters.org

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• Each step is not too improbable for us to countenance, but when you add them up cumulatively over millions of years, you get these monsters of improbability, like the human brain and the rain forest. It should warn us against ever again assuming that because something is complicated, God must have done it.

  Richard Dawkins

  Rain, Years, Done

  Source: inters.org

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• The future is too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency. We need all the fallibility we can get. Most of all, we need to preserve the absolute unpredictability and total improbability of our connected minds. That way we can keep open all the options, as we have in the past.

  Lewis Thomas

  Past, Agency, Interesting

  "The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher". Book by Lewis Thomas, 1974.

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• Nobody has any conscience about adding to the improbabilities of a marvelous tale.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Tales, Marvelous, Conscience

  1860 The Marble Faun, ch.4.

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• You are taken, shaken, by moments when the improbability of our lives comes over you like a fever. Everything is remarkable, people, living, events present themselves to you with the immediacy of players in some barbarous and splendid drama that it seems we are part of. You have been given new eyes.

  Doris Lessing

  Drama, Taken, Eye

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• The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale.

  Richard Dawkins

  Life, Science, Reality

  The Blind Watchmaker Chapter 11

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