Random Chance Quotes

The likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate matter is 1 to a number with 40,000 noughts after it (1040,000).... It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution. There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor any other, and if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence.

When a coincidence seems amazing, that's because the human mind isn’t wired to naturally comprehend probability & statistics.

Since the mass of mankind are too ignorant or too indolent to think seriously, if majorities are right it is by accident.

here is always inequity in life. Some men are killed in a war, and some men are wounded, and some men never leave the country, and some men are stationed in the Antarctic, and some are stationed in San Francisco. It's very hard in military or in personal life to assure complete equality. Life is unfair.'

If you have a faith, it is statistically overwhelmingly likely that it is the same faith as your parents and grandparents had. No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth. The convictions that you so passionately believe would have been a completely different, and largely contradictory, set of convictions, if only you had happened to be born in a different place.

In matters of observation chance favors only the prepared mind. (not literal translation) - Dan's les champs de observation le hasard ne favorise que les esprits prepares.

You never know what could happen.

When I go to Afghanistan, I realize I've been spared, due to a random genetic lottery, by being born to people who had the means to get out. Every time I go to Afghanistan I am haunted by that.

That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy.

Once we see, however, that the probability of life originating at random is so utterly minuscule as to make it absurd, it becomes sensible to think that the favorable properties of physics, on which life depends, are in every respect deliberate.... It is, therefore, almost inevitable that our own measure of intelligence must reflect higher intelligence -even to the limit of God.

I'm more afraid of some stupid accident.

The hooks didn't roll out any more sevens than my hands did before them.

Life cannot have had a random beginning. ... The trouble is that there are about two thousand enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in 10 to the 40,000 power, an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup.

Neither dead nor alive, the hostage is suspended by an incalculable outcome. It is not his destiny that awaits for him, nor his own death, but anonymous chance, which can only seem to him something absolutely arbitrary. He is in a state of radical emergency, of virtual extermination.

I think diseases have no eyes. They pick with a dizzy finger anyone, just anyone.

Seeing people as the products of pure chance in the random combination of genes … is a type of radical, scientific materialism.

As the saying goes, even a broken clock is right twice a day; that doesn't mean you should run out and buy one.

I know my daughter was dealt a very, very good birth card, but sometimes I feel like I want to honor the fact that she also drew a lottery that she didn't get to choose, which is that there is this thing called Eventbrite in our lives, and it sometimes takes precedence.

The good news is that in every deck of fifty-two cards there are 2,598,960 possible hands. The bad news is that you are only going to be dealt one of them.

The trouble with conspiracies, even those that are to everybody's advantage in the long run, is that they are open to abuse. If manipulators really had the powers claimed, they could win the lottery every week. I prefer to point out that they could also win a Nobel Prize for discovering fundamental physical forces hitherto unknown to science.

I can't remember if it was in the third grade in school, I was being told that two amoeba happened to hit in a muddy puddle of water two billion years ago, and I was an accident. I was the result. I wasn't real smart, but I said, 'I don't like the sound of that.'

Just think of all the billions of coincidences that don't happen.

The Law of Probabilities: the more things you try, the more likely one of them will work.

I have a Woody Allen Jewish attitude to life: that it's all going to be disastrous. That it hasn't all been that way is simply down to some random quirk of fate.

I would say don't take advice from people like me who have gotten very lucky. We're very biased. You know, like Taylor Swift telling you to follow your dreams is like a lottery winner telling you, 'Liquidize your assets; buy Powerball tickets - it works!'