Quotes About Chance

Prediction in a complex world is a chancy business. Every decision that a survival machine takes is a gamble, and it is the business of genes to program brains in advance so that on average they take decisions that pay off.

Creationist 'logic' is always the same. Some natural phenomenon is too statistically improbable, too complex, too beautiful, too awe-inspiring to have come into existence by chance. Design is the only alternative to chance that the authors can imagine. Therefore a designer must have done it.

There are athletes who believe God helps them win—against opponents who would seem, on the face of it, no less worthy of his favouritism. There are motorists who believe God saves them a parking space—thereby presumably depriving somebody else.

somebody who thinks natural selection is a theory of chance whereas—in the relevant sense of chance—it is the opposite.

An astronomically overwhelming majority of the people who could be born never will be. You are one of a tiny minority whose number came up. Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one.

The more statistically improbable a thing is, the less we can believe it just happened by blind chance...the obvious alternative to chance is an Intelligent Designer.

Single-step selection is just another way of saying pure chance. This is what I mean by nonrandom survival improperly understood. Cumulative selection, by slow and gradual degrees, is the explanation, the only workable explanation that has ever been proposed, for the existence of life's complex design.

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.

Natural selection is anything but random.

As I have put it before, if the second dinosaur to the left of the tall cycad tree had not happened to sneeze and thereby fail to catch the tiny, shrew-like ancestor of all the mammals, we would none of us be here. We all can regard ourselves as exquisitely improbable. But here, in a triumph of hindsight, we are.

The chances of each of us coming into existence are infinitesimally small, and even though we shall all die some day, we should count ourselves fantastically lucky to get our decades in the sun.

Life was a bit about luck. Mostly though, it was a stacked deck. Life was only about getting the next footstep right.

The most important things of your life can change so suddenly, so unrecoverably, that you can forget even the most important of them and their connections, you are so taken up by the chanciness of all's that happened and by all that could and will happen next.

Though finally the worst thing about regret is that it makes you duck the chance of suffering new regret just as you get a glimmer that nothing's worth doing unless it has the potential of to fuck up your whole life

Though finally the worst thing about regret is that it makes you duck the chance of suffering new regret just as you get a glimmer that nothing's worth doing unless it has the potential to fuck up your whole life.

Though finally the worst thing about regret is that it makes you duck the chance of suffering new regret just as you get a glimmer that nothing's worth doing unless it has the potential to fuck up your whole life. A

In closing I want to remind you yet again of Pasteur's remark, "Luck favors the prepared mind." Yes, it is a matter of luck just what you do; it is much less luck you will do something if you prepare yourself to succeed. "Creativity" is just another name for the great successes which make a difference in history.

Like all lotteries, it was an attempt to distract and dilute labor force discontent with irrational hope.

The universe will reward you for taking risks on its behalf. SHAKTI GAWAIN

Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish. OVID

Julie's cookery is actually improving, Paul wrote Charlie [his twin]. I didn't quite believe it would, just between us, but it really is . It's simpler, more classical.... I envy her this chance. It would be such fun to be doing it at the same time with her.

Life seemed even more of a guessing game than usual.

everything was down to chance, that the world existed in a state of perpetual chaos, and only some primitive storytelling instinct, itself doubtless a hangover from religion, retrospectively imposed meaning on what might or might not have happened.

If I asked you "What is life?", you would probably reply, in so many words, that it is all just a coincidence