Rene Dubos 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.

He [the historian] should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.

The greatest thing that science teaches you is the law of unintended consequences.

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.

The consequences of our actions are always so complicated, so diverse, that predicting the future is a very difficult business indeed.

Life is not an orderly progression, self-contained like a musical scale or a quadratic equation... If one is to record one's life truthfully, one must aim at getting into the record of it something of the disorderly discontinuity which makes it so absurd, unpredictable, bearable.

Human destiny is bound to remain a gamble, because at some unpredictable time and in some unforeseeable manner nature will strike back.

Fate rules the affairs of men, with no recognizable order.

After all, our lives are but a sequence of accidents - a clanking chain of chance events. A string of choices, casual or deliberate, which add up to that one big calamity we call life.

A single ray of light from a distant star falling upon the eye of a tyrant in bygone times may have altered the course of his life, may have changed the destiny of nations, may have transformed the surface of the globe, so intricate, so inconceivably complex are the processes in Nature.

Most of the time-- 99 percent of the time-- you just don't know how and why the threads are looped together, and that's okay. Do a good thing and something bad happens. Do a bad thing and something good happens. Do nothing and everything explodes.

Certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.

The only thing we know about the future is that it will be faster changing and more unpredictable than the present.

I want people to take thought about their condition and to recognize that the maintainence of a free society is a very difficult and complicated thing and it requires a self-denying ordinance of the most extreme kind. It requires a willingness to put up with temporary evils on the basis of the subtle and sophisticated understanding that if you step in to do something about them you not only may make them worse, you will spread your tenticles and get bad results elsewhere.

What is nonmeasurable and nonpredictable will remain nonmeasurable and nonpredictable ... no matter how much hate mail I get.

parenting is an exercise in unintended consequences.

Vast ills have followed a belief in certainty.

You get pseudo-order when you seek order; you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness.

If fate is a shape-shifter, then loves is too. It can be, anyway, in its most dangerous form. It´s your best day and then your worst. It´s your most hope and then you most despair. Lightness, darkness, it can swing between extremes at lightning speed- a boat upon the water on the most dangerous day, and then the clouds crawl in and the sky turns black and the sea rages and the boat is lost.

Our wills and fates do so contrary run, That our devices still are overthrown; Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.

We will have more crises and none of them will look like this because no two crises have anything in common except human nature.

Life seemed even more of a guessing game than usual.

Every great decision creates ripples. Like a huge boulder dropping in a lake. The ripples merge and rebound off the banks in unforseeable ways. The heavier the decision, the larger the waves, the more uncertain the consequences.

I have observed over the years that the unanticipated consequences of social action are always more important, and usually less agreeable, than the intended consequences.