Quotes About Probabilities

an embittered Jefferson would suggest that newspapers ought to be divided into four sections: Truths, Probabilities, Possibilities, and Lies.)

Frazier realized that many suppositions would never be proved. There were possibilities and probabilities and few provabilities.

In the main we deal in this life, he says, chiefly with probabilities, with difficult choices often having to do with lesser evils, with situations where one must weigh the pros and cons and often act without anything approaching certainty, but act one must, for it is better even to make a mistake than to hobble oneself permanently in indecision.

He saw people. He felt the heat and cold of uncounted probabilities. He knew names and places, experienced emotions without number, reviewed data of innumerable unexplored crannies. There was time to probe and test and taste, but no time to shape. The thing was a spectrum of possibilities from the most remote past to the most remote future—from the most probable to the most improbable. He saw his own death in countless ways. He saw new planets, new cultures. People. People.

Only a mentality that could see the entire multiverse would be able to dispense with probabilities.

There are no absolute certainties in this universe. A man must try to whip order into a yelping pack of probabilities, and uniform success is impossible.

So please don't forget that considering the probabilities of future returns only begins the decision-making process. Decisions have consequences. If the consequences of being badly wrong about future returns would imperil your financial future, be conservative.

Nothing comes to my desk that is perfectly solvable," President Obama explained to the author Michael Lewis. "Otherwise, someone else would have solved it. So you wind up dealing with probabilities. ... You can't be paralyzed by the fact that it might not work out." Thomas Jefferson explained this to his secretary of the treasury: "What is good in this case cannot be effected. We have, therefore, only to find out what will be least bad.

The classic view of the correct price of a common stock is that it is derived from the value of all the future earnings. These earnings are uncertain and subject to unknowable factors. Could anyone have known beforehand how to allow for the impact of 9/11 on the future earnings, hence on the then current market price, of firms headquartered in the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center? These future payoffs are discounted to a present value reflecting their various probabilities and risks.

The art of drawing conclusions from experiments and observations consists in evaluating probabilities and in estimating whether they are sufficiently great or numerous enough to constitute proofs. This kind of calculation is more complicated and more difficult than it is commonly thought to be. . .

How foolish it would be to suppose that one only needs to point out this origin and this misty shroud of delusion in order to destroy the world that counts for real, so-called 'reality.' We can destroy only as creators. -- But let us not forget this either: it is enough to create new names and estimations and probabilities in order to create in the long run new 'things.

Hope is not the basis for policy. Wise policymakers analyze major issues such as immigration carefully and look at facts and probabilities instead of just hoping for the best.

The future is a fabric of interlacing possibilities," he said. "Some of which gradually become probabilities, and a few of which become inevitabilities, but there are surprises sewn into the warp and the woof, which can tear it apart.

It is impossible to trap modern physics into predicting anything with perfect determinism because it deals with probabilities from the outset.

Fear was stronger than the calculation of probabilities.

Probabilities—the surest screen a wise man can place between himself and the truth.

Secrets are rarely betrayed or discovered according to any programme our fear has sketched out. Fear is almost always haunted by terrible dramatic scenes, which recur in spite of the best-argued probabilities against them.

Love interrupts the past and opens the future to new probabilities.

The rules of rebalancing don't guarantee you're going to win every time. But rebalancing means you're going to win more often. It increases your probabilities of success. And probabilities through time are what dominate the success or failure of your investment life.

wherefore one who divines well in regard to the truth will also be able to divine well in regard to probabilities. It

How much time is wasted in what is called thought, but is merely care--an anxious idling over the fancied probabilities of result

The possibilities and probabilities are all we have to work with in medicine, though. What we are drawn to in this imperfect science, what we in fact covet in our way, is the alterable moment-the fragile but crystalline opportunity for one's know-how, ability, or just gut instinct to change the course of another's life for the better.

Quantum physics might seem to undermine the idea that nature is governed by laws, but that is not the case. Instead it leads us to accept a new form of determinism: given the state of a system at some time, the laws of nature determine the probabilities of various futures and pasts rather than determining the future and past with certainty.

But probabilities are not about the world; they're about our ignorance of the world.