Theodosius Dobzhansky Quotes

I believe that life is chaotic, a jumble of accidents, ambitions, misconceptions, bold intentions, lazy happenstances, and unintended consequences, yet I also believe that there are connections that illuminate our world, revealing its endless mystery and wonder.

The more chaos there is, the more science holds on to abstract systems of control, and the more chaos is engendered.

My worlds collide. When one things happens, it just starts a domino effect - everything else goes on.

When everything is perfectly orderly and understandable, there has to be one thing that puts everything into question.

The world is twice as crazy as it's ever been.

Anything you build on a large scale or with intense passion invites chaos.

Wars and revolutions cannot be prescribed and the circle of their influence determined in advance.

… history turns out as always to be too messy, contingent and subject to the vagaries of human agency to be slotted into neat boxes.

History is much more the product of chaos than of conspiracy.

Complexity and innovation are not always good things.

Life is full of ironies and absurdities.

When things start running a bit too well on the tracks, I tend to derail them if I can.

The reason my games are chaotic is that the world is chaotic, not me. I don't aim for bad endings - they just naturally come out.

He sighed, wondering how his life had been turned upside down by this woman in less than forty-eight hours. Correction: by this woman, a pig, and a rabbit.

What is the point? We assume that every time we do anything we know what the consequences will be, i.e., more or less what we intend them to be. This is not only not always correct. It is wildly, crazily, stupidly, cross-eyed-blithering-insectly wrong!

The unpredictability inherent in human affairs is due largely to the fact that the by-products of a human process are more fateful than the product.

parenting is an exercise in unintended consequences.

As has often been said, a ship is like a lady's watch, always out of repair.

When you want to know how things really work, study them when they're coming apart.

In a world like this one, only the random makes sense.

Life is not, nor ever has been, a straight line forward ... Life is characterized much more by exception and disorder than by total or perfect order.

The world stands on absurdities, and without them perhaps nothing at all would happen.

in the midst of war and crisis nothing is as clear or as certain as it appears in hindsight

Life itself is a haphazard, untidy, messy affair.