Life will always remain a gamble, with prizes sometimes for the imprudent, and blanks so often to the wise.
It may happen that small differences in the initial conditions produce very great ones in the final phenomena. A small error in the former will produce an enormous error in the later. Prediction becomes impossible, and we have the fortuitous phenomena.
It's always very important to me to try to create a story that feels unpredictable. You can't jump ahead and see what's coming, but at the end, when you've watched the whole thing, it all feels inevitable.
On ne sait jamais! One never knows!
Unpredictability is the greatest asset a leader can have.
It is the unforeseeable that creates the event.
The true law of economics is chance, and we learned people arbitrarily seize on a few moments and establish them as laws.
Woe to him who would ascribe something like reason to Chance, and make a religion of surrendering to it.
When we see an effect happen always in the same manner, we infer that it takes place by a natural necessity; as, for instance, that the sun will rise to morrow; but nature often deceives us, and will not submit to its own rules.
No other human activity is so continuously or universally bound up with chance. And through the element of chance, guesswork and luck come to play a great part in war.
I realized that there are no certainties in life. You can't manipulate fate.
There is no law of history any more than of a kaleidoscope.
We are living in a world in which developments are harder to predict and one that has become more uncertain. In such a world, you must be prepared for the unpredictable. Nobody predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall or the Arab Spring.
This tremendous friction which cannot, as in mechanics, be reduced to a few points, is everywhere in contact with chance, and brings about effects that cannot be measured just because they are largely due to chance.
It affords a violent prejudice against almost every science, that no prudent man, however sure of his principles, dares prophesy concerning any event, or foretell the remote consequences of things.
Knowing the importance of luck, you should be particularly suspicious when highly consistent patterns emerge from the comparison of successful and less successful firms. In the presence of randomness, regular patterns can only be mirages.
The future is not Google-able.
Research is a way of taking calculated risks to bring about incalculable consequences.
I think it's fair to say you can't predict a straight line to victory. You know, there'll be good days and bad days along the way.
We cannot always assure the future of our friends
Unpredictability. Accidents. Not good when you’re engaging in, say, brain surgery, but when lighting...wonderful!
In various and different circumstances certain objects and individuals are going to turn out to be vital. The wager of survival cannot, by its nature, reveal which, in advance of events.
Well, sir, you never can tell. That's a principle in life with me, sir, if you'll excuse my having such a thing.
History unfolds itself by strange and unpredictable paths. We have little control over the future; and none at all over the past.
