Quotes About Randomness

Fortune's a fickle wench. She can knee you in the groin at any time.

Accidents happen. That's what everyone says. But in a quantum universe there are no such things as accidents, only possibilities and probabilities folded into existence by perception.

Das Rechtschreibprogramm kann nicht denken [...]. Wenn Sie es dem Rechtschreibprogramm überlassen, über ihr Leben zu bestimmen, dann könnten Sie auch gleich würfeln.

you have enough monkeys randomly striking keyboard keys (they have recently traded in their typewriters for PCs), one of them will eventually type Hamlet

In 1965, I was teaching a seminar on freedom when I told my students that the ultimate freedom lay in casting a dice to decide what to do. They were so shocked and fascinated that I knew I had to write the book.

One of the most important factors in life, politics and war, to which historians tend to devote too little attention, is sheer luck, good or ill.

Wisdom triumphs over chance.

Everything is chance, or nothing is chance. If I believed the first, I would be unable to live on, but I am not yet fully convinced of the second.

In practice, a good deal of the outcomes produced by the market reflect nothing more than luck - good or bad.

A lucky chance is constant in nothing but inconstancy.

Don't minimize the importance of luck in determining life's course.

In the queer mess of human destiny the determining factor is luck.

No writer should minimize the factor that affects everyone but is beyond control: luck.

The lucky man is he who knows how much to leave to chance.

We can't run this experiment a thousand times to see the range of different outcomes. We can only run it once. The human mind has trouble with situations like that. We see patterns where they don't exist, we find meaning in randomness.

The stars' positions were randomly generated, a fact that drove Pluto crazy.

Why couldn't I fill my hard drive with random bytes, so that individual files would not be discernible? Their very existence would be hidden in the noise, like a striped tiger in tall grass. And we could continually stream random noise back and forth to each other.

If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters, they might write all the books in the British Museum.

Do you believe in chaos- in random, uncontrolled events, in the idea that anything can happen at any time without fixed laws governing it? If you believe that, you will always be in a state of fear, not knowing what will happen from one moment to the next. The fear might be small, but it is there. That fear results in a lack of security and a feeling of mistrust.

Evolution is, as well as smarter than we are, infinitely more callous and cruel, and also capricious.

To the dumb question Why me? the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: why not?

To the dumb question "Why me?" the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not? The

La vida es azarosa e injusta, y el pecado, por muy original que sea, queda generalmente impune.

Who is it who decides that one man should live and another should die? My life wasn't worth any more than his, but he's the one who's buried, while I get to enjoy at least a few more hours above the ground. Is it chance, random and cruel, or is there some purpose or pattern to all this, even if it lies beyond our ken?