Probabilistically Quotes & Sayings

No one comes into our house and pushes us around. — Dan Devine

Imagine that you are agonizing over a choice - which career to pursue, whether to get married, how to vote, what to wear that day. You have finally staggered to a decision when the phone rings. It is the identical twin you never knew you had. During the joyous conversation it comes out that she has just chosen a similar career, has decided to get married at around the same time, plans to cast her vote for the same presidential candidate, and is wearing a shirt of the same color - just as the behavioral geneticists who tracked you down would have bet. How much discretion did the "you" making the choices actually have if the outcome could have been predicted in advance, at least probabilistically, based on events that took place in your mother's Fallopian tubes decades ago? — Steven Pinker

Like most lazy upper-middle-class kids, American Studies seemed like a fun way to use your knowledge of TV to get an A. — Nick Kroll

Accurate processing of information about outcomes is no simple task under the variable conditions of everyday life ... usually, many factors enter into determining what effects, if any, given actions will have, Actions, therefore, produce outcomes probabilistically rather than certainly. Depending on the particular conjunction of factors, the same course of action may produce given outcomes regularly, occasionally, or only infrequently — Albert Bandura

The possibilities for mobilizing the experience, imaginations, and intelligence of workers, both employed and unemployed, are limitless. — Dominique Bouhours

If we believe terrorists are past redemption, we should just rip up like 1/2 the New Testament because it was written by one. — Shane Claiborne

If suffering is ubiquitous in life, the withdrawal from and avoidance of suffering is accordingly the withdrawal from and avoidance of life. You — Kelly G. Wilson

No generation before us has faced a decade of choices that will so profoundly impact the course of life on this planet as those we now face. And no generation before us has had the opportunity to enrich the future so vastly. — Eban Goodstein

All social rules and all relations between individuals are eroded by a cash economy, avarice drags Pluto himself out of the bowels of the earth. — Karl Marx

I love my nation, I cannot see you degraded, weakened any more than you are now. Therefore I am bound for your sake and for truth's to cry, "Hold!" and to raise my voice against this degradation of my race. Give up these weakening mysticism and be strong ... — Swami Vivekananda

Always imitate the behavior of the winners when you lose. — George Meredith

It's easy to fight when everything's right And you're mad with the thrill and the glory; It's easy to cheer when victory's near, And wallow in fields that are gory. It's a different song when everything's wrong, When you're feeling infernally mortal; When it's ten against one, and hope there is none, Buck up, little soldier, and chortle! — Robert W. Service

The existence of God is neither precluded nor rendered improbable by the existence of evil. Of course, suffering and misfortune may nonetheless constitute a problem for the theist; but the problem is not that his beliefs are logically or probabilistically incompatible. The theist may find a religious problem in evil; in the presence of his own suffering or that of someone near to him he may find it difficult to maintain what he takes to be the proper attitude towards God. Faced with great personal suffering or misfortune, he may be tempted to rebel against God, to shake his fist in God's face, or even to give up belief in God altogether. But this is a problem of a different dimension. Such a
problem calls, not for philosophical enlightenment, but for pastoral care. The Free Will Defense, however, shows that the existence of God is compatible, both logically and probabilistically, with the existence of evil; thus it solves the main philosophical problem of evil. — Alvin Plantinga