Philip K. Dick Quotes

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

I failed math twice, never fully grasping probability theory. I mean, first off, who cares if you pick a black ball or a white ball out of the bag? And second, if you’re bent over about the color, don’t leave it to chance. Look in the damn bag and pick the color you want.

I've become addicted to playing poker because you're constantly faced with confusion, and winning is trying to make sense out of nonsense.

Luck is not scalable. Luck is not a national strategy.

Probability is the very guide of life.

In mathematics, as in physics, so much depends on chance, on a propitious moment.

There was no protection, no quota system when it came to luck. It was like that moment in math when a child learns that the odds of heads or tails is always one-in-two, no matter how many times one has flipped the coin and gotten heads. Every flip, the odds are the same. Every day, you could be unlucky all over again.

A reasonable probability is the only certainty.

This branch of mathematics [Probability] is the only one, I believe, in which good writers frequently get results which are entirely erroneous.

We must become more comfortable with probability and uncertainty.

In 1965, I was teaching a seminar on freedom when I told my students that the ultimate freedom lay in casting a dice to decide what to do. They were so shocked and fascinated that I knew I had to write the book.

The game is a game, and things happen, and you can't always execute your plan as perfectly as you'd like to.

Sometimes in this game it's as good to be lucky as it is to be good.

Probability is expectation founded upon partial knowledge. A perfect acquaintance with all the circumstances affecting the occurrence of an event would change expectation into certainty, and leave nether room nor demand for a theory of probabilities.

Very low probability events occur very rarely, but sometimes they do happen.

Life is a school of probability

Coincidences, in general, are great stumbling-blocks in the way of that class of thinkers who have been educated to know nothing of the theory of probabilities.

I'm always trying to calculate the mathematical probability of certain outcomes.

Guess, if you can, and choose, if you dare.

The nice thing about baseball is that all of the possible outcomes are known - it's not quite as messy as the real world. That makes the game an excellent playground for probability.

I guess if there weren't luck involved, I'd win 'em all.

Every tournament's different.

There is no doubt such a thing as chance, but I see no reason why Providence should not make use of it.

Nothing is so unpredictable as a throw of the dice, and yet every man who plays often will at some time or other make a Venus-cast: now and then he indeed will make it twice and even thrice in succession. Are we going to be so feebleminded then as to aver that such a thing happened by the personal intervention of Venus rather than by pure luck?

We never know until the beast of opportunity is staring us in the face.