Quotes About Contingency

I am someone who hopes for the best and prepares for the worst.

We're hoping for the best, but we need to prepare for the worst.

A 99% Value-at-Risk calculation does not evaluate what happens in the last one percent... This is like an airbag that works all the time, except when you have a car accident.

Sometimes you're lucky and sometimes you're not. Any biography is chance, and, beginning at conception, chance—the tyranny of contingency—is everything. Chance is what I believed Mr. Cantor meant when he was decrying what he called God.

As much as you obsess about all the things that can go wrong, it is inevitably something you can't imagine that ends up going wrong. Which justifies worrying about everything just to make sure it's all covered.

The best=laid plans, one's most fastidious contingency strategies have revealed themselves in the cold light of day to be laughably inadequate, no match for the happenstance that seems of late only to promise death, mayhem, poverty, flood. And here you are, having spent all that time protecting your home from the oncoming elements only to find that it has been shored up with crackers.

When you are not at home in your self, as a child, you don't experience your self as "natural" or "inevitable"—as so many other people seem to do—and this, though melancholy at the time, can come with certain distinct advantages. Not to take yourself as a natural, unquestionable entity can lead you in turn to become aware of the radical contingency of life in general, its supremely accidental nature.

I was brought up that when things don't work out, you go to your alternative.

Somewhere in the distance, the synchronic circles of our pasts had tripped a domino, and the steady whirr had grown till it now drowned with the roar of contingency

We must prepare for as many futures as possible, not merely the ones we prefer.

A spare tyre is something that you don't check until you have a punctured one.

A writer's work has to take account of many rhythms: Vulcan's and Mercury's, a message of urgency obtained by dint of patient and meticulous adjustments and an intuition so instantaneous that, when formulated, it acquires the finality of something that could never have been otherwise. But it is also the rhythm of time that passes with no other aim than to let feelings and thoughts settle down, mature, and shed all impatience or ephemeral contingency.

We are ready for any unforeseen event that may or may not occur.

Expect the best, prepare for the worst. Right?" "As long as a person doesn't spend all their time preparing for the worst and miss when they stumble across the best.

I can see only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.

He is mad about being small when you were big, but no, that's not it, he is mad about being helpless when you were powerful, but no, not that either, he is mad about being contingent when you were necessary, not quite it, he is insane because when he loved you, you didn't notice.

if we incentivize conformance, people will insert contingency reserves to prevent their tasks from missing the schedule. The more granular the schedule, the larger the schedule reserves. And these reserves aggregate into even longer timelines. The more we increase planning detail and the harder we try to incentivize performance, the worse our problem becomes.

If you plan for the worst—if you can live with the worst—the good will always take care of itself.

Si todo parece ir según el plan, intenta encontrar algo que hayas pasado por alto y que podría mandarlo todo al garete».

I prepare for the worst, but hope for the best.

All religions, nearly all philosophies, and even a part of science testify to the unwearying, heroic effort of mankind desperately denying its contingency.

Los grandes ejércitos transportan consigo lo necesario para asegurarse de que lo que pudiera ir mal no vaya

Life is incredibly contingent and unexpected.

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.