Quotes About Probability

Floyd could imagine a dozen things that could go wrong; it was little consolation that it was always the thirteenth that actually happened.

So the problem of Evil never really existed. To expect the universe to be benevolent was like imagining one could always win at a game of pure chance.

It had to happen to someone. There is nothing exceptional about you, any more than there is about the first neutron that starts the chain reaction in an atomic bomb. It simply happens to be the first. Any other neutron would have served

windows of nonsurvivability

It is more than possible; it is probable.

When you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. (p. 261).

No probability, however seductive, can protect us from error; even if all parts of a problem seem to fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, one has to remember that the probable need not necessarily be the truth, and the truth not always probable.

Pascal was even convinced that he could use his theories to justify a belief in God. He stated that 'the excitement that a gambler feels when making a bet is equal to the amount he might win multiplied by the probability of winning it'.

A large amount of identically encrypted material provides a cryptanalyst with a correspondingly larger chance of identifying the key.

She was like the revolutionist at fifty: not afraid of death, but bored by the probability of bad steaks and bad breaths and sitting up all night on windy barricades.

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

My father lived to be 97 and played bridge every day up to the end, so I've got a 50 percent chance of living a long life like him.

You can predict your future life, only predict not assure.

Hope provides comfort, and hope does not always require probability.

Nassim Taleb, a statistician, risk analyst, and author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, calls it the "Lucretius Problem." Named

Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin.

Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin.

Humans are actually far more likely to get taken out by an impact event or a supervolcano than we are to get killed in a crash of a commercial airliner.

I never liked riding in helicopters because there's a fair probability that the bottom part will get going around as fast as the top part.

The well-known paradox of the theory of probabilities is that, to all seeming, it can extract knowledge from ignorance and certainty from doubt.

In practical life we are compelled to follow what is most probable ; in speculative thought we are compelled to follow truth.

He had made a discovery of the first magnitude. It opened up an entirely new approach to physics, which led to statistical mechanics, to a proper understanding of thermodynamics and to the use of probability distributions in quantum mechanics. If he had done nothing else, this breakthrough would have been enough to put him among the world's great scientists.

One can say with reasonable confidence that the likelihood of something analogous to a human evolving is really pretty high.