Quotes & Sayings About Probability

The principle of [divine] purpose ... stares the biologist in the face wherever he looks ... The probability for such an event as the origin of DNA molecules to have occurred by sheer chance is just too small to be seriously considered. — Ernst Boris Chain

Even when the corporate risk tolerance is low it is still possible to take some working interest in a risky project. Clearly, zero working interest is the lower limit and 100% working interest is the high limit. Somewhere between these two extremes there must be an optimum working interest to take which depends on both the parameters of the project (success probability, estimated gains, and estimated costs) and on the corporate risk tolerance. — Ian Lerche

That an organism will see the light, hear the night, or touch the wind is subject to probability. And that its perfection is in its functioning is a myth. I take it not as a right to be when probability precedes the being. Its limitations is in its functioning, then its limited right to be is in ensuring proper functioning of its systems. I often debate just how much time to give in discourse to someone whose mind refuses to communicate with his reasoning. — Dew Platt

Most of you will probably never really discover anything. You may not contribute anything to the great equations that describe the universe to the world. But you will have the good fortune of encountering people of exceptional intelligence. People who are much smarter than you. Never get in their way, never group together in disgruntled circles and play games. Respect talent, real talent. Worship it. Clever people will always be disliked. Don't exploit that to crawl your way to the top. By the laws of probability most of you are mediocre. Accept it. The tragedy of mediocrity is that even mediocre people shake their heads and mull over how "standards are falling". So don't mull. Just know when you've to get out of the way. Most of you will be sideshows, extras in the grand unfolding of truth. That's all right. Once you accept that and let the best brains do their jobs, you will have done your service to science and mankind. — Manu Joseph

PROBABILITY BY LIA PURPURA Most coincidents are not miraculous, but way more common than we think - it's the shiver of noticing being central in a sequence of events that makes so much seem wild and rare - because what if it wasn't? Astonishment's nothing without your consent. — Anonymous

Do not expect to arrive at certainty in every subject which you pursue. There are a hundred things wherein we mortals ... must be content with probability, where our best light and reasoning will reach no farther. — Isaac Watts

Consider the case of a person who holds a view with probability 1. Then coherence says that it is no use having a debate with them because nothing will change their mind. — Dennis Lindley

99 percent confident that the world really was getting warmer and that there was a high degree of probability that it was due to human-made greenhouse gases. — James Hansen

And human instinct is ancient and reliable, utterly mysterious and possibly capable of great genius. I believe that refined, fluent instincts are a person's most valuable asset. My own instincts have repeatedly guided me against the grain of logic and probability. When I have trusted and followed their direction, they have never been wrong. I don't know how or why. But I know that every significant experience-positive or negative-sharpens them and makes them more accurate. — Augusten Burroughs

Try calculating the probability of getting a call from an old friend after just thinking about them. Or, your favorite song coming on the radio just as you turn on the car. Or, you smiling at a stranger, just as they needed to receive a smile. These are the events unexplained by logic, reason, and probability, yet are the foundation and guiding principles of faith. — Charles F. Glassman

The probability of success is difficult to estimate; but if we never search the chance of success is zero. — Philip Morrison

I am genuinely sorry for scientists of the younger generation who never knew Fisher personally. So long as you avoided a handful of subjects like inverse probability that would turn Fisher in the briefest possible moment from extreme urbanity into a boiling cauldron of wrath, you got by with little worse than a thick head from the port which he, like the Cambridge mathematician J. E. Littlewood, loved to drink in the evening. And on the credit side you gained a cherished memory of English spoken in a Shakespearean style and delivered in the manner of a Spanish grandee. — Fred Hoyle

If I am always standing at the bottom of the mountain longingly looking up, in all probability it is because I have heeded the pillaging dogma of mediocrity which persistently tells me that the dream is not worth the climb. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

You call forth the world which God has formed and that world only. Nor is this life of yours by which you set such store your doing, however you may choose to tell it. Its shape was forced in the void at the onset and all talk of what might otherwise have been is senseless for there is no otherwise. Of what could it be made? Where be hid? Or how make its appearance? The probability fo the actual is absolute. That we have no power to guess it out beforehand makes it no less certain. That we may imagine alternate histories means nothing at all. — Cormac McCarthy

If we look at the way the universe behaves, quantum mechanics gives us fundamental, unavoidable indeterminacy, so that alternative histories of the universe can be assigned probability. — Murray Gell-Mann

In flying, the probability of survival is inversely proportional to the angle of arrival. — Neil Armstrong

I think the probability of a supernatural creator existing is very very low, — Richard Dawkins

If that's true and the rate stays like that for another 40 years, there's a good probability that somebody who is active in the credit economy for that period of time might be a victim. But that's not a given. — Keith Anderson

The probability of finding a particular book increases in relation to the clarity of the store's focus, the diligence and shrewdness of the bookseller, and the size of the business. — Gabriel Zaid

You travel life has the aspect of a dream. It is something outside the normal, yet you are in it. It is peopled with characters you have never seen before and in all probability will never see again. It brings occasional homesickness, and loneliness, and pangs of longing ... But you are like the Vikings who have gone into a world of adventure, and home is not home until you return. — Agatha Christie

The probability that a genius can do stupid things is much higher than the probability that a stupid can do genius things. — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Paul Buchheit: I'm suddenly reminded that, for a while, I asked people if they were playing Russian Roulette with a gun with a billion barrels (or some huge number, so in other words, some low probability that they would actually be killed), how much would they have to be paid to play one round? A lot of people were almost offended by the question and they'd say, "I wouldn't do it at any price." But, of course, we do that everyday. They drive to work in cars to earn money and they are taking risks all the time, but they don't like to acknowledge that they are taking risks. They want to pretend that everything is risk-free. — Jessica Livingston

Very few people would choose to have even the most fabled assortment of goods if it meant getting cancer within the year. But the choice involves not the certainty of cancer very soon but an increased probability of cancer at some time in the future. The cancers are no less real; millions will die painfully and prematurely because of what we do to our environment. But the choice is not an easily visualizable one, and our capacity of denial comes strongly into play - as it tends to whenever we must weigh future costs against immediate benefits. — Paul L Wachtel

In the financial system we have today, with less risk concentrated in banks, the probability of systemic financial crises may be lower than in traditional bank-centered financial systems. — Timothy Geithner

And some scientists and other intellectuals are convinced - too eagerly in my view - that the question of God's existence belongs in the forever inaccessible PAP category. From this, as we shall see, they often make the illogical deduction that the hypothesis of God's existence, and the hypothesis of his non-existence, have exactly equal probability of being right. — Richard Dawkins

The more belief and confidence we feel toward achieving our goal, the higher the probability of our making the changes required to hit our targets. — Michael Hyatt

In all probability, the man who found the horoscope would also catch Nut and Nutcracker. They had to believe all the more strongly in the astrologer's new forecast since none of his predictions had ever come true. Sooner or later, his prognoses had to be right, given that the king, who could never be wrong, had made him his Grand Augur. — E.T.A. Hoffmann

They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words. — William Faulkner

The more people you contact, the higher your sales will be because of the law of probabilities. — Brian Tracy

Obviously, things can get derailed, particularly if, which looks more and more likely, you get a blow-up between Israel and Iran. I think that's a very real probability now. But barring some real blow-up, the U.S. economy will grow, after a slow first quarter, about 3, 3.5 percent this year, far better than it was in 2011. — Steve Forbes

It is only by fidelity in little things that the grace of true love to God can be sustained, and distinguished from a passing fervor of spirit ... No one can well believe that our piety is sincere, when our behavior is lax and irregular in its little details. What probability is there that we should not hesitate to make the greatest sacrifices, when we shrink from the smallest? — Francois Fenelon

The only thing that can be predicted is the probability of different events. — Richard Feynman

Anything at all is possible. Some things are unlikely. Some things will never happen. But they always could, at any time. — Ashly Lorenzana

In all probability, mental states are processes and activities of the brain. Exactly what activities, and exactly at what level of description, remains to be seen. — Patricia Churchland

The fact that we don't keep repeating tests in the same arena is not because the probability of the hypothesis showing its falsity in other arenas goes up after it has passed tests in one arena. — Robert Nozick

A problem of statistical inference or, more simply, a statistics problem is a problem in which data that have been generated in accordance with some unknown probability distribution must be analyzed and some type of inference about the unknown distribution must be made. — Morris H. DeGroot

A novel is a large diffused picture, comprehending the characters of life, disposed in different groups, and exhibited in various attitudes, for the purposes of an uniform plan, and general occurrence, to which every individual figure is subservient. But this plan cannot be executed with propriety, probability, or success, without a principal personage to attract the attention, unite the incidents, unwind the clue of the labyrinth, and at last close the scene, by virtue of his own importance. — Tobias Smollett

Probability is a kind of penance, which God made, suitable, I presume to that state of mediocrity and probationership he has been pleased to place us in here; wherein, to check our over-confidence and presumption, we might, by every day's experience, be made sensible of our short-sightedness, and liableness to error. — John Locke

Never trust the occultist who tells you that he is the head of a tradition, because if he were, in the first place, he would not tell the fact to the uninitiated, and in the second place he would in all probability be living in great seclusion and inaccessible to all but his immediate subordinates. If a man is a great artist he does not need to inform us of the fact; we shall know him by his pictures that are hung in the galleries of the nation, and we shall, moreover, find that he guards himself from casual acquaintances because of the inroads on his time to which his fame renders him liable. The more eminent a person, the harder he is to approach, not out of any spirit of pride and exclusiveness, but because so many people want to see him that discrimination has to be used in admitting them. — Dion Fortune

A red dragonfly hovers above a backwater of the stream, its wings moving so fast that the eye sees not wings in movement but a probability distribution of where the wings might be, like electron orbitals: a quantum-mechanical effect that maybe explains why the insect can apparently teleport from one place to another, disappearing from one point and reappearing a couple of meters away, without seeming to pass through the space in between. There sure is a lot of bright stuff in the jungle. Randy figures that, in the natural world, anything that is colored so brightly must be some kind of serious evolutionary badass. — Neal Stephenson

Yochai Benkler likens cultural creation to blood drives: the quality of donations increases when organizers stop paying.12 "Remember, money isn't always the best motivator," Benkler said, reiterating the point during a TED Talk touching on similar themes. "If you leave a fifty dollar check after dinner with friends, you don't increase the probability of being invited back. And if dinner isn't entirely obvious, think of sex. — Anonymous

Suppose someone tells you that he just flipped a coin 10 times and all 10 were heads? What is the probability that the next flip will be heads too? If you think 50%, then you are discounting the very high probability that the game is rigged. And this makes you a sucker. — Dmitry Orlov

In the U.S.A. or Europe there is no realistic way to estimate the type, magnitude, or probability of the risk, nor any way to narrow down the potentially affected regions. — Jurgen Habermas

Even the humblest men have a strange reason behind greed. Every man thinks money solves problems - and every man thinks not just of himself, but his next three generations - there is a probability he will live to see those generations - and he wants to care for them in times of strife. — Siddharth Katragadda

He who laughs loudest has a high probability of being extremely inebriated. — Lois Greiman

To be a super-trader, you'll need an edge to overcome the laws of probability and the uncertainty of the marketplace. That edge comes from information flow, the ability to correct your habits in terms of the market's characteristics, and being able to take risks, cut losses, expand your information network, ferret out ideas, and take recommendations. — Ari Kiev

A likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility. The story should never be made up of improbable incidents; there should be nothing of the sort in it. — Aristotle.

The Keeper of Clouds has unpenned his charges.
The Keeper of Winds has unlocked his gates.
The Keeper of Waters has opened the sky.
The Keeper of Lightnings waves his lances.
The Keeper of satellites has observed,
'One hundred percent of probability of precipitation. — Roger Zelazny

Unfortunately, their approach was based on the traditional dating paradigm, which I had previously abandoned on the basis that the probability of success did not justify the effort and negative experiences. — Graeme Simsion

And by letting go of trying to control the uncontrollable ... you ironically increase ... the probability of getting what you want. — Michael Neill

We receive no message in the strict sense of the word when a friend enters a room and says "good morning." The word has no function to select from an ensemble of possible states, though situations are conceivable in which it would have.

The most interesting consequence of this way of looking at communication is the general conclusion that the greater the probability of a symbol's occurrence in any given situation, the smaller will be its information content. Where we can anticipate we need not listen. It is in this context that projection will do for perception. — E.H. Gombrich

Probability said that someday we would run out of luck - as — Gene Kranz

Money isn't always the best motivator. If you leave a $50 check after dinner with friends, you don't increase the probability of being invited back. — Yochai Benkler

If a lack of empirical foundations is a defect of the theory of logical probability, it is also a defect of deductive logic. — David Stove

We have to deal with this new type of threat in a way we haven't yet defined ... With a low-probability, high-impact event like this ... If there's a one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. — Dick Cheney

He already knew that life was largely illusion, that though wonderful things could happen, nevertheless as many disappointments came in compensation: and he knew, too, that life could offer a quality even worse - the probability that nothing would happen at all. — William Sansom

Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945 and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated. — Paul Nitze

Contemporary scholars have little explored the preconditions of genocide. Still less have they asked whether a society's weapons policy might be one of the institutional arrangements that contributes to the probability of its government engaging in some of the more extreme varieties of outrage. Though it is a long step between being disarmed and being murdered-one does not usually lead to the other-but it is nevertheless an arresting reality that not one of the principal genocides of the twentieth century, and there have been dozens, has been inflicted on a population that was armed. — Daniel D. Polsby

I began to entertain a suspicion, that no man in this age was sufficiently qualified for such an undertaking; and that whatever any one should advance on that head would, in all probability, be refuted by further experience, and be rejected by posterity. Such mighty revolutions have happened in human affairs, and so many events have arisen contrary to the expectation of the ancients, that they are sufficient to beget the suspicion of still further changes. — David Hume

It is highly probable that we choose our posture, not our problems. — T.F. Hodge

The quantum theory is based on the idea that there is a probability that all possible events, no matter how fantastic or silly, might occur. — Michio Kaku

Why did math matter so much? Some reasons were practical: More and more jobs required familiarity with probability, statistics, and geometry. The other reason was that math was not just math. Math is a language of logic. It is a disciplined, organized way of thinking. There is a right answer; there are rules that must be followed. More than any other subject, math is rigor distilled. Mastering the language of logic helps to embed higher-order habits in kids' minds: the ability to reason, for example, to detect patterns and to make informed guesses. Those kinds of skills had rising value in a — Amanda Ripley

I don't like being inconvenienced, and I especially don't like being inconvenienced too many times in a row. If something I don't like happens, then several more things that I don't like happen directly afterward, that is too many. They shouldn't cluster like that.
Unfortunately, that's just how probability works. — Allie Brosh

For every action, there's an infinity of outcomes. Countless trillions are possible, many milliards are likely, millions might be considered probable, several occur as possibilities to us as observers - and one comes true. — China Mieville

What happens with fear is that probability doesn't matter very much. That is, once I have raised the possibility that something terrible can happen to your child, even though the possibility is remote, you may find it very difficult to think of anything else. Emotion becomes dominant. — Daniel Kahneman

There may be no sign of it, no probability of it, no germ of it from which to start, but God is able to make it out of nothing by a word. He does so make it by the word which faith claims. He needs no protoplasm to build His magnificent edifices of worlds. "He spake, and it was done; He commanded, and it stood fast." Into the soul that has no basis or remnant of goodness, but is dead in trespasses and sins, He can speak life and holiness. — A.B. Simpson

We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would. — Zbigniew Brzezinski

Further, the same Arguments which explode the Notion of Luck, may, on the other side, be useful in some Cases to establish a due comparison between Chance and Design: We may imagine Chance and Design to be, as it were, in Competition with each other, for the production of some sorts of Events, and many calculate what Probability there is, that those Events should be rather be owing to the one than to the other. — Abraham De Moivre

I read somewhere that luck is not blind, just illiterate. Luck, I mused, is a palliative for those who don't know probability and statistics. — Orhan Pamuk

Promise has 50% chance of happening.
At least always make 2 promises at once. — Toba Beta

A point of great importance would be first to know: what is the capacity of the earth? And what charge does it contain if electrified? Though we have no positive evidence of a charged body existing in space without other oppositely electrified bodies being near, there is a fair probability that the earth is such a body, for by whatever process it was separated from other bodies - and this is the accepted view of its origin - it must have retained a charge, as occurs in all processes of mechanical separation. — Nikola Tesla

He had a particular facination with the I Ching, that art of tossing three coins three times and divining a pattern out of heads and tails. Pete would begin with questions:
What determined the pattern? Was it random? Was it a higher power? Was is mathematical? Wasn't poker based on mathematical probability and not just luck? Did that mean randomness was actually mathematical? And if the I Ching was governed by mathematics, hey, wouldn't that mean the I Ching was actually predictable, a prescribed answer? And if it was prescribed, did that mean that your life followed the I Ching, like some sort of equation? Or did the I Ching simply capture correctly what had already been determined as the next series of events in your life? — Amy Tan

If you sat with a pencil and jotted down all the decisions you've taken in the past week, or, if you could, over your lifetime, you would realize that almost all of them have had asymmetric payoff, with one side carrying a larger consequence than the other. You decide principally based on fragility, not probability. Or to rephrase, You decide principally based on fragility, not so much on True/False. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Only in Britain could it be thought a defect to be too clever by half. The probability is that too many people are too stupid by three-quarters. — John Major

Most moral philosophers consciously or unconsciously assume the essential correctness of our cultural sexual code - family, monogamy, continence, the postulate of privacy, ... restriction of intercourse to the marriage bed, etcetera. Having stipulated our cultural code as a whole, they fiddle with details - even such piffle as solemnly discussing whether or not the female breast is an "obscene" sight! But mostly they debate how the human animal can be induced or forced to obey this code, blandly ignoring the high probability that the heartaches and tragedies they see all around them originate in the code itself rather than the failure to abide by the code. — Robert A. Heinlein

She thought of the boy's features as an exquisite distillation out of random patterns-endless queues of happenstance meeting at this nexus. — Frank Herbert

Entropy theory, on the other hand, is not concerned with the probability of succession in a series of items but with the overall distribution of kinds of items in a given arrangement. — Rudolf Arnheim

Figure 18. As the thickness of a layer increases, the two surfaces produce a partial reflection of monochromatic light whose probability fluctuates in a cycle from 0% to 16%. Since the speed of the imaginary stopwatch hand is different for different colors of light, the cycle repeats itself at different rates. Thus when two colors such as pure red and pure blue are aimed at the layer, a given thickness will reflect only red, only blue, both red and blue in different proportions (which produce various hues of violet), or neither color (black). If the layer is of varying thicknesses, such as a drop of oil spreading out on a mud puddle, all of the combinations will occur. In sunlight, which consists of all colors, all sorts of combinations occur, which produce lots of colors. — Richard Feynman

The probabilitation of possibilities is the mother of many unrealistic ideas,uninformative decisions,inappropriate measures and unfair actions because most of the times we were approximate where we needth to be exact. — Mpho Leteng

Women are sometimes drawn in to believe against probability by the unwillingness they have to doubt their own merit. — Samuel Richardson

The entrant mooed like a calf but in insolence looked about him. Hew saw Kit. Kit saw him. Nay, it was more than pure seeing. It was Jove's bolt. It was, to borrow from the papists, the bell of the consecration. It was the revelation of the possibility nay the certainty of the probability or somewhat of the kind of the. It was the sharp knife of a sort of truth in the disguise of danger. Both went out together, and it was as if they were entering, rather than leaving, the corridor outside with its sour and burly servant languidly asweep with his broom, the major-domo in livery hovering, transformed to a sweet bower of assignation, though neither knew the other save in a covenant familiar through experience unrecorded and unrecordable whose terms were not of time and to which space was a child's puzzle. — Anthony Burgess

Guesstimate = better than a guess but not as guaranteed as an estimate ...
i.e. It's simply a calculated forecast based on probability, historical trends, observations, analytical research, politics, studies of human nature and good ol' common sense (the latter 2 of which usually cause a toxic sediment when mixed, LOL) ... — A.A. Bell

The greatest risks are never the ones you can see and measure, but the ones you can't see and therefore can never measure. The ones that seem so far outside the boundary of normal probability that you can't imagine they could happen in your lifetime - even though, of course, they do happen, more often than you care to realize. — Charles Wheelan

In a high tech world the cure for the tragic shortcomings and perilous fallacies of human intuition is education, but education in economics, evolutionary biology, probability and statistics - unfortunately most High School and College curricula have barely changed since Medieval times! — Steven Pinker

If we had enough data then this statistical approach would undoubtedly sort out these things, and a lot of problems are arising precisely because we haven't got enough documents for the statistical approach to be wholly valid. I know you can calculate levels of probability and so forth, but to establish this really clearly we want a lot more information than we have actually got available. This is surely our major problem that we are still at the very limits at which you can use a technique of this sort. - John Chadwick — Jennifer K. McArthur

My favourite fellow of the Royal Society is the Reverend Thomas Bayes, an obscure 18th-century Kent clergyman and a brilliant mathematician who devised a complex equation known as the Bayes theorem, which can be used to work out probability distributions. It had no practical application in his lifetime, but today, thanks to computers, is routinely used in the modelling of climate change, astrophysics and stock-market analysis. — Bill Bryson

the worry habit is reinforcing in the same sense that superstitions are. Since people worry about many things that have a very low probability of actually occurring - a loved one dying in a plane crash, going bankrupt, and the like - there is, to the primitive limbic brain at least, something magical about it. Like an amulet that wards off some anticipated evil, the worry psychologically gets the credit for preventing the danger it obsesses about. The — Daniel Goleman

ANT (ANT) n.s.[aemett, Sax. which Junius imagines, not without probability, to have been first contracted to aemt, and then softened to ant.]An emmet; a pismire. A small insect that lives in great numbers together in hillocks. — Samuel Johnson

When it looks like the sun isn't going to shine any more, God puts a rainbow in the clouds. Each one of us has the possibility, the responsibility, the probability to be the rainbow in the clouds. — Maya Angelou

Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith. — Ursula K. Le Guin

There are errors which no wise man will treat with rudeness while there is a probability that they may be the refraction of some great truth still below the horizon. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

To leave the atom constituted as it was but to interfere with the probability of its undetermined behaviour, does not seem quite so drastic an interference with natural law as other modes of mental interference that have been suggested. (Perhaps that is only because we do not understand enough about these probabilities to realize the heinousness of our suggestion.) Unless it belies its name, probability can be modified in ways which ordinary physical entities would not admit of. There can be no unique probability attached to any event or behaviour; we can only speak of 'probability in the light of certain given information,' and the probability alters according to the extent of the information. It is, I think, one of the most unsatisfactory features of the new quantum theory in its present stage that it scarcely seems to recognize this fact, and leaves us to guess at the basis of information to which its probability theorems are supposed to refer. — Arthur Stanley Eddington

you can pass a football,you can gas,but you yourself cannot just pass~cam after lilly's mother informs her that lilly has passed — Wendy Wunder

Fourth Law of Thermodynamics: If the probability of success is not almost one, then it is damn near zero. — David R. Ellis

Scientists still do not appear to understand sufficiently that all earth sciences must contribute evidence toward unveiling the state of our planet in earlier times, and that the truth of the matter can only be reached by combing all this evidence ... It is only by combing the information furnished by all the earth sciences that we can hope to determine 'truth' here, that is to say, to find the picture that sets out all the known facts in the best arrangement and that therefore has the highest degree of probability. Further, we have to be prepared always for the possibility that each new discovery, no matter what science furnishes it, may modify the conclusions we draw. — Alfred Wegener

Why is it that every time you do something you hope no one will notice, you get found out? I once read that the probability of someone watching you is directly proportional to the stupidity of the action. — Clare Kauter

Manners,[ ... ] are severly underappreciated in my opinion".
"Oh?"
Where practiced well, they remove the probability that someone in my position will be forced to go through the effort of killing someone in yours. Belive that on occasion that much death can become tedious. — Michelle Sagara West

Hearing may make shorter intuitive leaps than sight, but it too is subject to illusions. The most pleasant of these are 'mondegreens,' named by the author Sylvia Wright from her youthful mishearing of the Scottish ballad that actually says, 'They hae slain the Earl o' Moray / and they layd him on the green'--not, alas, 'the Lady Mondegreen.' Children, with their relaxed expectations for logic, are a rich source of these (pledging allegiance to 'one Asian in the vestibule, with little tea and just rice for all'), but everyone has the talent to infer the ridiculous from the inaudible--and, what's more, to believe in it. Here, at least, we do behave like computers, in that our voice-recognition software has little regard for probability but boldly assumes we live in a world of surrealist poets. We are certain that Mick Jagger will never leave our pizza burning and that the Shadow knows what evil lurks in the hot cement. — Michael Kaplan

The mind is not designed to grasp the laws of probability, even though the laws rule the universe. — Steven Pinker

I have stressed this distinction because it is an important one. It defines the fundamental difference between probability and statistics: the former concerns predictions based on fixed probabilities; the latter concerns the inference of those probabilities based on observed data. — Leonard Mlodinow