Leila Janah Quotes

A fool must now and then be right, by chance.

People make decisions that may have one intent and yet are somehow perverted into something else. And sometimes it's because of design. Sometimes it's because of happenstance. But very often, it's mysterious to them.

The law of unintended consequences pushes us ceaselessly through the years, permitting no pause for perspective.

The experimenter who does not know what he is looking for will not understand what he finds.

If I upset some notions and went against established rules, that wasn't part of what I wanted to do. It wasn't my goal.

Most of the time, the things that really change the world exist for something fundamentally selfish and then the world-changing ends up being a side-effect of that.

Accidents will happen in the best regulated families.

Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.

One sometimes finds what one is not looking for.

Do not ask for what you will wish you had not got.

Everything I've done I've just fallen into.

Ignorance of the facts of life gave me my beloved son, Dickon, but at what cost to both him and me, I cannot hazard a guess.

The problem - when you cast your net that wide - is you inevitably catch something you don't want to catch.

It seems to be a law of design that for every advantage introduced through redesign, there is an accompanying unintended disadvantage.

The best moments can't be preconceived. I've spent a lot of time in editing rooms, and a scene can be technically perfect, with perfect delivery and facial expression and timing, and you remember all your lines, and it is dead.

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.

And it will fall out as in a complication of diseases, that by applying a remedy to one sore, you will provoke another; and that which removes the one ill symptom produces others.

I found every single laugh as Laertes that you can find and only realized later that you really shouldn't find any at all.

There have been loads of times I have regretted meeting Paul because I was so happy in my old life.

It sometimes seems to me that the whole course of English history was one of accident, confusion, chance and unintended consequences - there's no real pattern.

Even though things happen by accident, you also unconsciously choose things that help you.

The illusion of purpose and design is perhaps the most pervasive illusion about nature that science has to confront on a daily basis.

If our extinction proceeds slowly enough to allow a moment of horrified realization, the doers of the deed will likely be quite taken aback on realizing that they have actually destroyed the world. Therefore I suggest that if the Earth is destroyed, it will probably be by mistake.

Twitter wasn't planned. It just happened.

Anybody can be very destructive in that position without at all meaning to be, and I know that I have been inadvertently destructive in the past for certain people on certain occasions.