Quotes About Randomness

Genetic randomness had already determined how much talent I'd been allotted, and destiny's randomness would account for my share of luck. The only piece I had any control over was my discipline. Recognizing that, it seemed like the best plan would be to work my ass off. That was the only card I had to play, so I played it hard.

the rags of chance.

Everything is contingent, and there is also chaos.

Any film you make is a crap shoot.

Once the cells in a biological machine stop working, it can never be started again. It goes into a cascade of decay, falling toward disorder and randomness. Except in the case of viruses. They can turn off and go dead. Then, if they come in contact with a living system, they switch on and multiply. (194)

Events happen. Or they don't.

Random chance is not sufficient to explain random chance. ~Jubal Harshaw

no one knows why things happen, you see? Anything could follow from anything. Even real history tells us nothing.

As you sow, so shall you reap has a neat ring to it but you are making a grievous mistake if you put your faith in that kind of cheap sentiment. There are no just deserts. The wages of sin are not necessarily hell and the path of goodness is often lined with treachery for the world is predicated upon the principle of randomness.

It would be frightening to think that in all the cosmos, which is so harmonious, so complete and equal to itself, that only human life is happening randomly, that only one's destiny lacks meaning.

Randomness scares people. Religion is a way to explain randomness.

Religion's just a well-oiled profit-driven denial of the randomness of it all.

To speak of chance is to negate the possibility of any law of cause and effect. Chance is the one final irrationality acceptable to the free will.

The modern world does not believe in purpose, only in cause. If modernity has a motto, it is 'shit happens'.

they are nothing but the perpetuation of chance events supported by myths.

The chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this way [i.e., randomly] is comparable to the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.

Everything existing in the universe is the fruit of chance and necessity

Einstein said God doesn't play dice with the universe, but I don't know--maybe not as a whole, but I think he gets a pretty big kick out of messing in peoples' back yards.

The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.

What people fear most about tragedy is its randomness - a taxi cab jumps the curb and hits a pedestrian, a gun misfires and kills a bystander. Better to have some rational cause and effect between incident and injury. And if cause and effect aren't possible, better that there at least be some reward for all the suffering.

Radomosity, thought Artemis. And he felt like weeping.

Creativity is the ability to introduce order into the randomness of nature.

She could flunk of no reason at all

Lottery: A tax on people who are bad at math.