Leon Trotsky Quotes

The greatest events occur without intention playing any part in them; chance makes good mistakes and undoes the most carefully planned undertaking. The world's greatest events are not produced, they happen.

Nothing is improbable until it moves into past tense.

News events cannot be controlled, nor can newscasts be mapped out like entertainment shows.

I never predict anything, and I never will.

Though men are apt to flatter and exalt themselves with their great achievements, yet these are, in truth, very often owing not so much to design as chance.

My favorite characters are always the unpredictable ones, and with Domino, you literally never know which way the dice are going to roll.

I'm crazy about surprises. I love chance.

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.

It is often to the wary that the events in life are unexpected. Looser types-people who are not busy weighing and measuring every little thing-are used to accidents, coincidences, chance, things getting out of hand, things sneaking up on them. They are the happy children of life, to whom life happens for better or worse.

The life we all live is amateurish and accidental; it begins in accident and proceeds by trial and error toward dubious ends.

Things turn out better by accident sometimes. But you can't organize accidents.

Man's life is ruled by fortune, not by wisdom.

You never know what's going to happen. Anything can happen there... and often does.

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

A totally blind process can by definition lead to anything; it can even lead to vision itself.

The threads of circumstance that lead to tomorrow are so tenuous that all the fussing and worrying about decisions is futile compared to the pure randomness of existence.

I always think of myself not so much as a painter but as a medium for accident and chance.

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.

Chance is the only source of true novelty.

I began in 1976, with small abstract paintings that allowed me to do what I had never let myself do: put something down at random. And then, of course, I realized that it never can be random. It was all a way of opening a door for me. If I don't know what's coming - that is, if I have no hard-and-fast image, as I have with a photographic original - then arbitrary choice and chance play an important part.

Our wisdom and deliberation for the most part follow the lead of chance.

You know, the process, I think, is the story. And it goes back, again, to what I said about chance and about radical contingency, the idea that all of this is this well-oiled machine that's been reared up and, like, really articulated and thought about.

Life's single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.

Does fate ever play by the rules?

Woe to him who would ascribe something like reason to Chance, and make a religion of surrendering to it.