Probability Quotes - Page 15

• Contrary to the popular notion that only creationism relies on the supernatural, evolutionism must as well, since the probabilities of random formation of life are so tiny as to require a 'miracle' for spontaneous generation tantamount to a theological argument.

  Chandra Wickramasinghe

  Miracle, Tiny, Generations

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• Contemporary scholars have little explored the preconditions of genocide. Still less have they asked whether a society's weapons policy might be one of the institutional arrangements that contributes to the probability of its government engaging in some of the more extreme varieties of outrage. Though it is a long step between being disarmed and being murdered - one does not usually lead to the other - but it is nevertheless an arresting reality that not one of the principal genocides of the 20th century, and there have been dozens, has been inflicted on a population that was armed.

  Daniel D. Polsby

  Gun, Reality, Government

  "Armed against genocide" by Glenn Reynolds, www.theguardian.com. March 20, 2006.

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• People are entirely too disbelieving of coincidence. They are far too ready to dismiss it and to build arcane structures of extremely rickety substance in order to avoid it. I, on the other hand, see coincidence everywhere as an inevitable consequence of the laws of probability, according to which having no unusual coincidence is far more unusual than any coincidence could possibly be.

  Isaac Asimov

  Science, Hands, Order

  Isaac Asimov (1976). “The planet that wasn't”, Doubleday Books

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• Some people are under the impression that all that is required to make a good fisherman is the ability to tell lies easily and without blushing; but this is a mistake. Mere bald fabrication is useless; the veriest tyro can manage that. It is in the circumstantial detail, the embellishing touches of probability, the general air of scrupulous - almost of pedantic - veracity, that the experienced angler is seen.

  Jerome K. Jerome

  Mistake, Lying, Air

  Jerome K. Jerome (2006). “Jerome K. Jerome: 14 Books in 1”, p.55, Shoes & Ships & Sealing Wax

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• However, the small probability of a similar encounter [of the earth with a comet], can become very great in adding up over a huge sequence of centuries. It is easy to picture to oneself the effects of this impact upon the Earth. The axis and the motion of rotation changed; the seas abandoning their old position to throw themselves toward the new equator; a large part of men and animals drowned in this universal deluge, or destroyed by the violent tremor imparted to the terrestrial globe.

  Pierre-Simon Laplace

  Science, Animal, Men

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• The earth in its rapid motion round the sun possesses a degree of living force so vast that, if turned into the equivalent of heat, its temperature would be rendered at least one thousand times greater than that of red-hot iron, and the globe on which we tread would in all probability be rendered equal in brightness to the sun itself.

  James Prescott Joule

  Science, Iron, Would Be

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• Regarding the air raid over Los Angeles it was learned by Army G2 that Rear Admiral Anderson...recovered an unidentified airplane off the coast of California...with no bearing on conventional explanation. This Headquarters has come to the determination that the mystery airplanes are in fact not earthly and, according to secret intelligence sources, they are in all probability of interplanetary origin.

  George C. Marshall

  Determination, Airplane, Army

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• I think the probability of a supernatural creator existing is very very low.

  Richard Dawkins

  Thinking, Lows, Creator

  "'Outspoken atheist' Dawkins admits he is agnostic" by Tim Edwards, www.theweek.co.uk. February 24, 2012.

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• As I have heard, since my arrival at this place, a circumstantial account of my death and dying speech, I take this early opportunity of contradicting the first, and of assuring you, that I have not as yet composed the latter. But by the All-Powerful Dispensations of Providence, I have been protected beyond all human probability or expectation; for I had four bullets through my coat, and two horses shot under me, yet escaped unhurt, although death was leveling my companions on every side of me!

  George Washington

  Horse, Powerful, Opportunity

  Washington Irving, George Washington (1904). “Life of George Washington”

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• I am genuinely sorry for scientists of the younger generation who never knew Fisher personally. So long as you avoided a handful of subjects like inverse probability that would turn Fisher in the briefest possible moment from extreme urbanity into a boiling cauldron of wrath, you got by with little worse than a thick head from the port which he, like the Cambridge mathematician J. E. Littlewood, loved to drink in the evening. And on the credit side you gained a cherished memory of English spoken in a Shakespearean style and delivered in the manner of a Spanish grandee.

  Fred Hoyle

  Sorry, Memories, Wrath

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• If that's true and the rate stays like that for another 40 years, there's a good probability that somebody who is active in the credit economy for that period of time might be a victim. But that's not a given.

  Keith Anderson

  Years, Credit, Might

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• Use this day to do something daring, extraordinary and unlike yourself. Take a chance and shape a different pattern in your personal cloud of probability!

  Vera Nazarian

  Clouds, Patterns, Different

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• If you sat with a pencil and jotted down all the decisions you've taken in the past week, or, if you could, over your lifetime, you would realize that almost all of them have had asymmetric payoff, with one side carrying a larger consequence than the other. You decide principally based on fragility, not probability. Or to rephrase, You decide principally based on fragility, not so much on True/False.

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  Taken, Past, Decision

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• Results rarely specify their causes unambiguously. If we have no direct evidence of fossils or human chronicles, if we are forced to infer a process only from its modern results, then we are usually stymied or reduced to speculation about probabilities. For many roads lead to almost any Rome.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Rome, Fossils, Causes

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History”, p.34, W. W. Norton & Company

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• I regard this conclusion as coming in the same sort of category, of historical probability so high as to be virtually certain, as the death of Augustus in AD 14 or the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70

  N. T. Wright

  Fall, Historical, Jerusalem

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• Do not mistake probability for truth, for it is a notorious liar.

  Robert Breault

  Truth, Mistake, Liars

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• Philosophy goes no further than probabilities, and in every assertion keeps a doubt in reserve.

  James Anthony Froude

  Philosophy, Doubt, Philosopher

  Short Studies on Great Subjects Calvinism (p. 51)

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• In all probability an outburst of desperation in the midst of general submissiveness will always help.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Helping, Desperation, Midst

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• If we only identify with the mortal world, then we identify with a level of scarcity and lack and brokenness, and that will be our experience. But if we shift our experience of self-identification - and this is what enlightenment is - from the body-self to the spiritual-self, then we place ourselves under an entirely different set of possibilities and probabilities.

  Marianne Williamson

  Spiritual, Self, Enlightenment

  "A Conversation with Marianne Williamson: Powerful pioneer in new thought and spirituality". Interview with Maranda Pleasant, www.marandapleasantmedia.com.

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• In all probability, mental states are processes and activities of the brain. Exactly what activities, and exactly at what level of description, remains to be seen.

  Patricia Churchland

  Brain, Levels, States

  "Causal machines". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 10, 2012.

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• There is certainly the intention of efforts like the Common Core to raise education standards and make sure that every student masters advanced math concepts - algebra, geometry, statistics and probability.

  Anya Kamenetz

  Math, Effort, Statistics

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• Take a dose of medicine once, and in all probability you will be obliged to take an additional hundred afterwards

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  Medicine, Hundred, Dose

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• The photographer, like an acrobat, must defy the laws of probability or even of possibility; at the limit, he must defy those of the interesting: the photograph becomes surprising when we do not know why it has been taken.

  Roland Barthes

  Taken, Law, Interesting

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• Statistical high Vegas odds probability is that nothing of any significance will ever happen to you in your entire boring life.

  Doug Stanhope

  Vegas, Odds, Boring

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• Trust a witness in all matters in which neither his self-interest, his passions, his prejudices, nor the love of the marvellous is strongly concerned. When they are involved, require corroborative evidence in exact proportion to the contravention of probability by the thing testified.

  Thomas Huxley

  Passion, Self, Prejudice

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