Quotes About Random

The power of natural selection is beyond dispute, but this power has limits. Natural selection can preserve innovations, but it cannot create them. And calling the change that creates them random is just another way of admitting our ignorance about it.

What made it happen? What made it not happen? Thinking of a cure, a week away from the city, a dinner party with other geniuses, a new rug, a new shirt, a new way to hold him in bed, and failing and failing and somehow, at random, succeeding. Was it worth it?

Back then, these journeys all seemed as random as the stars in the sky; only now can he see the zodiac turning above his life. Here, rising, comes the Scorpion.

The time trends and spatial features of cancer's occurrence around the globe clearly belie the notion that cancer is a random misfortune. Cancer associates with westernization. Whereas forty years ago, cancer was mostly a disease of wealthy nations, half of all cancers now occur in developing nations, particularly those rapidly industrializing.

In real life nothing means anything. Stuff happens and there just is no structure.

It's really chaos and darkness out there, and when we prétend it's not, it's just The Play. We're all onstage. Saying our lines. Playing at whoever we're trying to be at the moment. A lawyer. A spouse. Even though we know in the back of our heads that life is a lot more random and messed-up than we can ud to say to ourselves.

The paradoxical conclusion is that it would be very unlikely for unlikely events not to occur.

Can it be that all of physics—and, indeed, all of science—is based on creating all the matter in the universe from a dozen objects with totally random mass values, while no one has the faintest idea about their origin?

If you mix up chirality, a protein's properties change enormously. Life couldn't operate with just random mixtures of stuff.

Maybe life is random, but I doubt it.

The Buddhists believe that everything in life is random. There are patterns that are intrinsic to life. We don't know why, we just know they're there like the DNA. We have no idea.

The probability of life originating from accident is comparable to the probability of the unabridged dictionary resulting from an explosion in a printing shop.

uncultured youths who make random pronouncements on everything

Dictatorship, in its own twisted way, was understandable; repression was universal. War is so random, so arbitrary.

You only come to know these things in hindsight Ã¢â'¬â€œ when you look back and see the precarious chain of events, happenstance, and good fortune that led to wherever you are now. Before you reach that point, you have no way of predicting which idea will make a difference and which will die on the vine. That's why you record them all. No matter how random, how small, how half-baked, how unfinished it may be; if you have a thought, record it right away.

I have a Woody Allen Jewish attitude to life: that it's all going to be disastrous. That it hasn't all been that way is simply down to some random quirk of fate.

Yes, life always takes the side of life, and somehow the victims are blamed. But it wasn't the best people who survived, nor did the best ones die. It was random!

I was always playing the Hammond Organ back to front even during the days of the Nice, going back to 1968. Really what I was doing there, was choosing notes at random and trying to make some sense of them, improvising back to front.

The lullaby my husband puts our son to sleep with is so random. It's 'Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough' by Michael Jackson.

You can blow on the dice all you want, but whether they come up 'seven' is still a function of random luck.

I always think about taking 10 random people off the street and trying to pair them. Probably a lot of them are not going to work out, but randomly one might. That's basically what they're doing on 'The Bachelorette.' Here's 25 guys, see if you like one of them and it might work out.

I look a lot busier than I am, as I'm actually a rather sporadic, random person and I'll play a few gigs and then disappear for a while.

I wake up when the time is double digits - 10, 11, 12 - and I make myself a cup of coffee and think about what I'm gonna do that day. Either I'm gonna set my house on fire or I'm gonna take pictures. I'm random.

Many historians will tell you that there are no laws of history and no great cycles that govern human events. History often appears more random than rhythmic. But if not patterns or cycles, there are certainly coincidences and some are so marked that they are hard not to notice.