Random Chance Quotes & Sayings

Regression toward the mean. That is, in any series of random events an extraordinary event is most likely to be followed, due purely to chance, by a more ordinary one. — Leonard Mlodinow

Life is nothing if not a random motion of coincidences and quirks of chance; it never goes as planned or as foretold; frequently one gains happiness from being obliged to follow an unchosen path or misery from following a chosen one. — Louis De Bernieres

Henry liked to put to himself when he was a schoolboy: what are the chances of this particular fish, from that shoal, off that continental shelf ending up in the pages of this copy of the Daily Mirror? Something just short of infinity to one. Similarly, the grains of sand on a beach, arranged just so. The random ordering of the world, the unimaginable odds against any particular condition, still please him. Even as a child, and especially after Aberfan, he never believed in fate or providence, or the future being made by someone in the sky. Instead, at every instant, a trillion trillion possible futures; the pickiness of pure chance and physical laws seemed like freedom from the scheming of a gloomy god. — Ian McEwan

I had no wish to take any determined route on that stroll; I attempted, rather, a maximum latitude of probabilities in order not to wear out expectation with an obligatory anticipation of a single one of them. I was able, within the imperfect limits of possibility, to walk, as they say, at random. I accepted, without any conscious prejudice but that of avoiding the wider avenues and streets, the most obscure invitations of chance. — Jorge Luis Borges

Luck is not as random as you think.
Before that lottery ticket won the jackpot, someone had to buy it. — Vera Nazarian

The normal curve is a distribution most appropriate to chance and random activity. Education is a purposeful activity and we seek to have students learn what we would teach. Therefore, if we are effective, the distribution of grades will be anything but a normal curve. In fact, a normal curve is evidence of our failure to teach. — Benjamin Bloom

Sometimes the slightest things change the directions of our lives, the merest breath of a circumstance, a random moment that connects like a meteorite striking the earth. Lives have swiveled and changed direction on the strength of a chance remark. — Bryce Courtenay

The heart of the matter is whether knowing evil (or sin or crime or whatever you want to call it) is random or purposeful. If it's purposeful, we can fight it, it's hard to defeat, but we have a chance, like two boxers in the same weight class, more or less. If it's random, on the other hand, we're fucked, and we'll just have to hope that God, if He exists, has mercy on us. And that's what it all comes down to. — Roberto Bolano

Chance. Stupid, dumb, blind chance. Just a part of the strange mechanism of the world, with its fits and coughs and starts and random collisions. — Lauren Oliver

The Universe was a silly place at best ... but the least likely explanation for it was the no-explanation of random chance, the conceit that abstract somethings 'just happened' to be atoms that 'just happened' to get together in ways which 'just happened' to look like consistent laws and some configurations 'just happened' to possess self-awareness and that two 'just happened' to be the Man from Mars and a bald-headed old coot with Jubal inside. — Robert A. Heinlein

History was indeed controlled by blind forces, as well as character and courage and treachery and love. And accident and random chance. And stray bullets and telegrams and tips. And cats. — Connie Willis

The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance. — Robert Coveyou

In 1928, Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming found that a mysterious antibacterial fungus had grown on a petri dish he'd forgotten to cover in his laboratory: he discovered penicillin by accident. Scientists have sought to harness the power of chance ever since. Modern drug discovery aims to amplify Fleming's serendipitous circumstances a millionfold: pharmaceutical companies search through combinations of molecular compounds at random, hoping to find a hit. — Peter Thiel

There is a god. Nothing as tragic and ridiculous as this world could have happened by random chance. — Lynn Viehl

Not even the most hardened nihilist can live in the world of pure meaninglessness that his or her narrative presupposes. In their daily practice, the most ardent religious skeptics have to presuppose a basic order and intelligibility in reality that contradicts the creed of self-creation through random chance. — Michael S. Horton

With a more expansive stretch, there's a better chance that I'll be around at the precise, random moment when one of my nephews drops his guard and solicits my advice about something private. Or when one of my nieces will need someone other than her parents to tell her that she's smart and beautiful. — Frank Bruni

Random search for data on ... off-chance is hardly scientific. A questionnaire on 'Intellectual Immoralities' was circulated by a well-known institution. 'Intellectual Immorality No. 4' read: 'Generalizing beyond one's data'. [Wilder Dwight] Bancroft asked whether it would not be more correct to word question no. 4 'Not generalizing beyond one's data. — Hans Selye

It's the simple truth that mortal men cannot understand why the gods shape events as they do. Why some men and women are cut off in fullest flower, while others live to dwindle into shadows of themselves. Why virtue must sometimes be trampled and evil flourish amidst the beauty of a country garden. Why chance, sheer random chance, plays such an overwhelming role in the life lines and fate lines of men. — Guy Gavriel Kay

I'm not some random guy you just met. I'm not someone who doesn't know that what's at the core of you is worth working at, breaking through those walls for."
Oh my God.
"People don't get second chances often, Sasha, but we got one, and I'm not going to let that pass us by."
"A second chance?" I repeated dumbly. "For us?"
"That's what I'm thinking."
Stunned, I was quiet for a moment. "What if I don't want a second chance?"
He laughed. "Oh, you want a second chance. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

There are good people who are dealt a bad hand by fate, and bad people who live long, comfortable, privileged lives. A small twist of fate can save or end a life; random chance is a permanent, powerful player in each of our lives, and in human history as well. — Jeff Greenfield

Just ten years ago, probably the most prominent atheist of the twentieth century, Antony Flew, concluded that a God must have designed the universe. It was shocking news and made international headlines. Flew came to believe that the extraordinarily complex genetic code in DNA simply could not be accounted for naturalistically. It didn't make logical sense to him that it had happened merely by chance, via random mutations. It is a remarkable thing that Flew had the humility and intellectual honesty to do a public about-face on all he had stood for and taught for five decades. — Eric Metaxas

There's a Grand Designer behind everything. Your life is not a result of random chance, fate, or luck. There is a master plan. History is His story. God is pulling the strings. — Rick Warren

[The sound of the wind] was just more proof that the workings of the world were random, that beauty, like suffering, was meaningless, that human life was as pointless as waves on sand. — Anita Diamant

Lucretius wrote in The Nature of Things: Especially since this world is the product of Nature, the happenstance Of the seeds of things colliding into each other by pure chance In every possible way, no aim in view, at random, blind, Till sooner or later certain atoms suddenly combined So that they lay the warp to weave the cloth of mighty things: Of earth, of sea, of sky, of all species of living beings. — Marcelo Gleiser

You cannot have it both ways. You cannot apply a definitive conclusion to the favorable outcomes of random chance without also applying a definitive conclusion to the unfavorable outcomes of random chance. If you are not fair in both instances, it means you have just committed a variation of what is known as special pleading. — Michael Vito Tosto

When I started to pick up the bass, it was purely by random chance. — Eberhard Weber

Never underestimate a situation. Chance is random and is able to undo every preparation. — Elaina J. Davidson

Very little evidence was found that any individual fund was able to do significantly better than that which we expected from mere random chance. — Michael Jensen

Do we, holding that the gods exist, deceive ourselves with insubstantial dreams and lies, while random careless chance and change alone control the world? — Euripides

We all encounter random phenomena, arbitrary occurrences, chance meetings, and eerie coincidences. When we attach our own meaning to these events, we are feeding meaning into the random; we are choosing something arbitrary and assigning our own deeper purpose to it. The problem, though, is that we do this selectively. — Michael Vito Tosto

He loved the city most at night. The night hid many of the sorrows. It silenced the city yet brought deep undercurrents to the surface. It was in this dark slipstream that he believed he moved most freely. Behind the cover of shadows. Like a rider in a limousine, he looked out but no one looked in.
There was a random feel to the dark, the quirkiness of chance played out in the blue neon light. So many ways to live. And to die. — Michael Connelly

A single, random, foolish event can often change a life - a chance meeting, or an accident or a moment of madness. But more often it happens by increments like a creeping tide, so slowly that we barely notice. My life was altered by a diagnosis. It was never going to be a death sentence, but it has robbed me by degrees. — Michael Robotham

While it is certainly true that God's love for us does not protect us from pain and sorrow, it is also true that all occasions of pain and sorrow are under the absolute control of God. If God controls the circumstances of the sparrow, how much more does He control the circumstances that affect us? God does not walk away and leave us to the mercy of uncontrolled random or chance events. — Jerry Bridges

They rolled all over the pastel crayons scattered on the sheets so her back was variegated with patches and blotches all the colours of the rainbow and Lee was also marked everywhere with brilliant dusts, both here and there also darkly spotted with blood, each a canvas involuntarily patterned by those workings of random chance so much prized by the surrealists. — Angela Carter

You have about as much chance of contacting the Universal Mind with a spell from a book as you do of reaching the White House by dialing random numbers into a phone. — Katherine Lampe

Random chance is not sufficient to explain random chance. ~Jubal Harshaw — Robert A. Heinlein

It's not a random chance that we have Alanis Morissette. She didn't evolve out of a null and void. She came from a former template. She borrowed styles and sounds from a very limited set of other artists. — Greg Graffin

Life cannot have had a random beginning ... The trouble is that there are about 2000 enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in 10^40,000, an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup. — Fred Hoyle

What had sparked them to go from hating each other like these two did, to loving each other like they did now? Some random tumble of Fate, a fly-by jumble of chance. Zane didn't know, but he thanked God for it every day. — Abigail Roux

Point to Ponder: If there were no God, and everything was a result of random chance, there would be no purpose to your life. It all starts with God. — Rick Warren

Who is it who decides that one man should live and another should die? My life wasn't worth any more than his, but he's the one who's buried, while I get to enjoy at least a few more hours above the ground. Is it chance, random and cruel, or is there some purpose or pattern to all this, even if it lies beyond our ken? — Christopher Paolini

In spite of all evidence that life is discontinuous, a valley of rifts, and that random chance plays a great part in our fates, we go on believing in the continuity of things, in causation and meaning. But we live on a broken mirror, and fresh cracks appear in its surface every day. — Salman Rushdie

Detroit was kind of a random thing where it was like a chance to be in a rock 'n' roll movie. — Edward Furlong

No sane paleontologist would ever claim that he or she had discovered "The Ancestor." Think about it this way: What is the chance that while walking through any random cemetery on our planet I would discover an actual ancestor of mine? Diminishingly small. What I would discover is that all people buried in these cemeteries
no mater whether that cemetery is in China, Botswana, or Italy
are related to me to different degrees. I can find this out by looking at their DNA with many of the forensic techniques in use in crime labs today. I'd see that some of the denizens of the cemeteries are distantly related to me, others are related more closely. This tree would be a very powerful window into my past and my family history. It would also have a practical application because I could use this tree to understand my predilection to get certain diseases and other facts of my biology. The same is true when we infer relationship among species. — Neil Shubin

The random talk of people who have no chance of immortality and thus can speak their minds out has a setting, often, of lights, streets, houses, human beings, beautiful or grotesque, which will weave itself into the moment for ever. — Virginia Woolf

Nothing by chance, nothing is random, nothing is in vain, nothing is trivial — Miguel El Portugues

You could consider the idea of the multiverse, and think of it as something like a tree - that is, the universe we live in is one of an uncountable number of branches of possible universes, created by random chance and the decisions of sentient beings. So, for instance, when I rang you up in the morning, there was a possible future universe in which you answered the phone, and another in which you did not, and by answering the phone you put us in one universe and not the other. In that instance the time traveler doesn't just move from the future to the past and back to the future: he moves down one branch of the universe, toward the root that's back at the beginning of time, and back up another branch. — Dexter Palmer

You want to believe that those who work hard and sacrifice get ahead and those who are lazy and cheat do not. This, of course, is not always true. Success is often greatly influenced by when you were born, where you grew up, the socioeconomic status of your family, and random chance — David McRaney

Darwinism is not a theory of random chance. It is a theory of random mutation plus non-random cumulative natural selection ... Natural selection ... is a non-random force, pushing towards improvement ... Every generation has its Darwinian failures but every individual is descended only from previous generations' successful minorities ... [T]here can be no going downhill - species can't get worse as a prelude to getting better ... There may be more than one peak. — Richard Dawkins

...Tell me you believe that our lives are anything more than a ridiculous cascade of random chances. — Krystal Sutherland

If we are merely a chance product of 'random happenstance' and nothing more, doesn't it strike you as a bit odd that we have the ability to contemplate the question of 'random happenstance' with such methodical complexity? — Craig D. Lounsbrough

Maybe you believe that we fall into our future blindly, drifting from adventure to adventure, our journey zigzagging not according to plan but according to pure chance. Or just maybe, as random and haphazard as our lives seems
maybe that's exactly what the author had in mind. — Jodi Picoult

Unless, of course, there's no such thing as chance; ... in which case, we should either-optimistically-get up and cheer, because if everything is planned in advance, then we all have a meaning and are spared the terror of knowing ourselves to be random, without a why; or else, of course, we might-as pessimists-give up right here and now, understanding the futility of thought decision action, since nothing we think makes any difference anyway, things will be as they will. Where, then, is optimism? In fate or in chaos? — Salman Rushdie

Helen Justineau is thinking about dead children. She can't narrow it down, or doesn't want to. She thinks about all the children in the world who ever died without growing up. There must have been billions of them. Hecatombs of children, apocalypses, genocides of them. In every war, every famine, thrown to the wall. Too small to protect themselves, too innocent to get out of the way. Killed by madmen, perverts, judges, soldiers, random passers-by, friends and neighbours, their own parents. By stupid chance or ruthless edict. Every — M.R. Carey

Uch practices and beliefs, which interfere with happiness, are neither inevitable nor necessary; they evolved by chance, as a result of random responses to accidental conditions. But once they become part of the norms and habits of a culture, people assume that this is how things must be; they come to believe they have no other options. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

If you flip a coin three times and it lands on heads each time, it's probably chance. If you flip it a hundred times and it lands on heads each time, you can be pretty sure the coin has heads on both sides. That's the concept behind statistical significance - it's the odds that the correlation (or other finding) is real, that it isn't just random chance. — T. Colin Campbell

It's always fifty-fifty, Pete. Like tossing a coin. Either I'm wrong, or I'm right, either you bring us back, or you don't, either Deputy Chiefs are what they say they are, or they're not. Always fifty-fifty. One thing or the other is always true. — Lee Child

He could swear he did not look back, could not - by any optical chance, or in any prism - have seen her physically as he walked away; and yet, with dreadful distinction, he retained forever a composite picture of her standing where he left her. The picture - which penetrated him, through an eye in the back of his head, through his vitreous spinal canal, and could never be lived down, never - consisted of a selection and blend of such random images and expressions of hers that had affected him with a pang of intolerable remorse at various moments in the past. — Vladimir Nabokov

Fire and Water are archetypes, the split sides of consciousness; one aware, the other, not. The two parts of us that desire synthesis, yet resist it: the self and the shadow. But they are also the element of chance, of the random roll of dice. — Chris Abani

Chance" is just a word expressing ignorance — Richard Dawkins

My entire life has felt like chance. Random moments of loss and connection. This is the first one that feels, instead, like fate. — Christina Baker Kline

New York City is filled with random, quirky moments like this, chance collisions that just might change your life. — Hope Edelman

Walking at random through the streets, we came by chance upon the Cathedral of Notre Dame. I shall long remember my first impression of the scene within. The lofty gothic ceiling arched far above my head and through the stained windows the light came but dimly - it was all still, solemn and religious. — Bayard Taylor

One night, Ye was working the night shift. This was the loneliest time. In the deep silence of midnight, the universe revealed itself to its listeners as a vast desolation. What Ye disliked most was seeing the waves that slowly crawled across the display, a visual record of the meaningless noise Red Coast picked up from space. Ye felt this interminable wave was an abstract view of the universe: one end connected to the endless past, the other to the endless future, and in the middle only the ups and downs of random chance - without life, without pattern, the peaks and valleys at different heights like uneven grains of sand, the whole curve like a one-dimensional desert made of all the grains of sand lined up in a row, lonely, desolate, so long that it was intolerable. You could follow it and go forward or backward as long as you liked, but you'd never find the end. — Liu Cixin

The thing that's hard about it - the thing that makes it so hard when the person you love has been taken from you, not by something evil you could have seen coming but by random, pure chance - is that you find yourself suddenly living through a history other than the one you expected to live, through no fault of your own. I feel . . . it's hard to describe, but I feel weirdly outside of time. Ever since the accident I've had these moments when I felt like a visiting guest in this world, not a permanent resident. Like sometimes I look in a mirror and I feel like I can almost see through the version of me on the other side of the glass. And sometimes I feel like I can see the history I used to be in more clearly than the history I'm in now - the real history is one where Philip and Sean and I are all together, being a family and doing whatever family things people do, and this one's like . . . like a fake version of events that I've been yanked into, where everything's gone wrong. — Dexter Palmer

What Ye disliked most was seeing the waves that slowly crawled across the display, a visual record of the meaningless noise Red Coast picked up from space. Ye felt this interminable wave was an abstract view of the universe: one end connected to the endless past, the other to the endless future, and in the middle only the ups and downs of random chance - without life, without pattern, the peaks and valleys at different heights like uneven grains of sand, the whole curve like a one-dimensional desert made of all the grains of sand lined up in a row, lonely, desolate, so long that it was intolerable. You could follow it and go forward or backward as long as you liked, but you'd never find the end. On — Liu Cixin

I did not very often consider the reasons my father died. I didn't believe his life was taken to instill some larger meaning in my character, or make me a better person. I preferred to believe that a person might be taken for no reason other than the random winds of chance, the same forces that could create a brilliant sky after a terrible storm. — Jill Bialosky

I used to be an atheist, until I realized I had nothing to shout during blowjobs. Oh Random Chance! Oh Random Chance! just doesn't cut it ... . — Robert Anton Wilson

There is no path to the future, Fitz. The path is now. Now is all there is, or ever will be. You can change perhaps the next ten breaths in your life. But after that, random chance seizes you in its jaws again. A tree falls on you, a spider bites your ankle, and all your grand plans for winning a battle are for naught. Now is what we have Fitz, and now is where we act to stay alive. — Robin Hobb

It was chance. A random series of events given meaning by somone desperate to prove there's a design to our lives. That the minutes and hours between our birth and death are ore than frantic moments of chaos. Because if that's all they are - if there are no rules governing our lives - then our entire existence is a meaningless farce. — Shaun David Hutchinson

Sergeant Grigori Peshkov. He was elected unopposed. Grigori was pleased. He knew what life was like for soldiers and workers, and he would bring the machine-oil smell of real life to the corridors of power. He would never forget his roots and put on a top hat. He would make sure that unrest led to improvements, not to random violence. Now he had a real chance to make a better life for Katerina and Vladimir. — Ken Follett

Every life is a mystery. And every story of every life is a mystery. But it is not what happens that is the mystery. It is whether it has to happen no matter what, whether it is ordered and ordained, fixed and fated, or whether it can be missed, avoided, circumvented, passed by; that is the mystery.
If she had not come along the Via Piemonte that day, would it still have happened? If she had come along the Via Piemonte that day, but ten minutes later than she did, would it still have happened? Therein lies the real mystery. And no one ever knows, and no one ever will.
("For The Rest Of Her Life") — Cornell Woolrich

In the end, each life is no more than the
sum of contingent facts, a chronicle of chance intersections, of flukes, of random events that divulge nothing but their own
lack of purpose. — Paul Auster

Will the time ever come when I am not so completely dependent on thoughts I first had in childhood to furnish the feedstock for my comparisons and analogies and sense of the parallel rhythms of microhistory? Will I reach a point where there will be a good chance, I mean a more than fifty-fifty chance, that any random idea popping back into the foreground of my consciousness will be an idea that first came to me when I was an adult, rather than one I had repeatedly as a child? — Nicholson Baker

Life, he suspected, hinges too often on chance. We all want to convince ourselves that it is about hard work and education and perseverance, but the truth is, life is much more about the fickle and the random. We don't want to admit it, but we are controlled by luck, by timing, by fate. In her case, the luck, the — Harlan Coben

Quantitative work shows clearly that natural selection is a reality, and that, among other things, it selects Mendelian genes, which are known to be distributed at random through wild populations, and to follow the laws of chance in their distribution to offspring. In other words, they are an agency producing variation of the kind which Darwin postulated as the raw material on which selection acts. — John B. S. Haldane

He openned the door that he assumed was the garage only to find himself in the pantry.
crap.
"Um ... grabbing some Pop-Tarts for the road," Nick said, covering his mistake. Still, they both stared at him as if he'd escaped Arkham Asylum. Offering them a fake smile, he grabbed the pastries, crossed himself, and hoped he got the next door correct.
Nope. Bathroom.
With a pain-filled groan at his rampant stupidity, Nick pretended to use it before he tried again. At least there were only two more doors to go.
Fifty-fifty chance.
Thankfully, third time was the charm. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Random chance was not a sufficient explanation of the Universe
in fact, random chance was not sufficient to explain random chance; the pot could not hold itself. — Robert A. Heinlein

In modern times, the sisters have largely disappeared from the collective consciousness, but the idea of Fate hasn't. Why do we still believe? Does it make tragedy more bearable to believe that we ourselves had no hand in it, that we couldn't have prevented it? It was always ever thus.

Things happen for a reason, says Natasha's mother. What she means is Fate has a Reason and, though you may not know it, there's a certain comfort in knowing that there's a Plan.

Natasha is different. She believes in determinism- cause and effect. One action leads to another leads to another. Your actions determine your fate. In this way she's not unlike Daniel's dad.

Daniel lives in the nebulous space in between. Maybe he wasn't meant to meet Natasha today. Maybe it was random chance after all.

But.

Once they met, the rest of it, the love between them, was inevitable. — Nicola Yoon

I'd say," the Ranger answered after a few seconds' deliberation, "that he'll be heading south now that he has the chance. Back into Araluen."
"How do you know that?" Horace asked. He was always impressed at the two Rangers' ability to read a situation and come up with the correct answer to a problem. Sometimes, he thought, they almost seemed to have divine guidance.
"I'm guessing," Halt told him. — John Flanagan

I CHOOSE to live by choice not by chance, to be motivated not manipulated, to be useful not used, to make change not excuses, to excel not compete. I CHOOSE self-esteem not self pity. I choose to listen to my inner voice, NOT TO LISTEN TO THE RANDOM OPINIONS OF OTHERS. — Auliq Ice

But simple luck is the random birthright of the hapless. When seasoned by the subtleties of accident, harmony, favor, wisdom, and inevitability, luck takes on the cast of serendipity. Serendipity happens when a well-trained mind looking for one thing encounters something else: the unexpected. It comes from being in a position to seize opportunity from the happy marriage of time, place, and chance. — Margot Lee Shetterly

A journey of observation must leave as much as possible to chance. Random movement is the best plan for maximum observation — Tahir Shah

The future's so random, and so mobile, there's no way you're going to get to your vision of what you want your community to be just by chance alone. I really believe you have to let people know, to use your voice, to say, 'this is what I like about my place, I want to keep it this way, this is what I think can be improved, this is what I disapprove of.' That's the only way you can have a part in shaping the future. — Rick Bass

Oh, many a shaft at random sent
Finds mark the archer little meant!
And many a word at random spoken
May soothe, or wound, a heart that's broken! — Walter Scott

Dawn and sunset are the times when Nature herself is unstable and in flux. The nocturnal world and the daytime world are meeting, and for a brief time coexisting. It's not a neat hard cut, but a blurred, irregular dissolve. These moments are the seams in existence through which we can get a glimpse of the deeper, fundamentally random, chance workings of a system in which we are only a small, insignificant player. — Bill Viola

What really counted was the possibility of escape, a leap of freedom, out of the implacable ritual, a wild run for it that would give whatever chance for hope there was. Of course, hope meant being cut down on some street corner, as you ran like mad, by a random bullet. But when I really thought it through, nothing was going to allow me such a luxury. Everything was against it; I would just be caught up in the machinery again. — Albert Camus

You're not really in control, not with this falling-for-people stuff. You don't plan who you're going to fall in love with. It's all random - chance accidents of time and place. — Julia Green

It is important to distinguish 'pure chance' from 'chance' or 'accident.' Things may happen by chance or accident in a purely deterministic universe ... Now there is perhaps a sense of 'could not have done otherwise' in which whether or not a person could or could not have done otherwise depends on whether or not the universe is deterministic. — J.J.C. Smart

When one ponders on the tremendous journey of evolution over the past three billion years or so, the prodigious wealth of structures it has engendered, and the extraordinarily effective teleonomic performances of living beings from bacteria to man, one may well find oneself beginning to doubt again whether all this could conceivably be the product of an enormous lottery presided over by natural selection, blindly picking the rare winners from among numbers drawn at random. [Nevertheless,] a detailed review of the accumulated modern evidence [shows] that this conception alone is compatible with the facts. — Jacques Monod

Verbal arguments should always be suspect. — Lee Spetner

...while there may have been gods, they weren't particularly well defined. If, for instance, something unusually lucky happened, one might declare that a god--pick one--was feeling generous that day. And if a particularly bad thing happened, a god (usually a different one) was upset about something or other. Gods, in other words, were what most of us would now call chance or luck. And in that sense they served their purpose, by making a random existence seem less random. — Gene Doucette

To me, chance isn't random. The universe is bound by unseen threads. We have only to untangle them a little to see the pattern unfold. — Kathleen Tessaro

Does identity matter anyway? I have my doubts. We are what we do, not what we think. Only the interactions count (there is no problem with free will here; that's not incompatible with believing your actions define you). And what is free will anyway? Chance. The random factor. If one is not ultimately predictable, then of course that's all it can be. — Iain M. Banks

What do people think of when they talk about their lives? Do they really see them as an integral whole, as a chronological sequence of events; as something logical, purposeful, completed? What moments do they remember, and how do they remember them? As words? As a series of images and sounds? My life crumbles into a series of pictures, unconnected scenes which comes to mind only occassionally and at random. But there are key events, the acts of chance or fate, which later enable me to construct a logical whole of my life. One such moment was meeting Jose. The other was my decision to see our love through to the very end. — Slavenka Drakulic

Random mutations much more easily debilitate genes than improve them, and that this is true even of the helpful mutations. Let me emphasize, our experience with malaria's effects on humans (arguably our most highly studied genetic system) shows that most helpful mutations degrade genes. What's more, as a group the mutations are incoherent, meaning that they are not adding up to some new system. They are just small changes - mostly degradative - in pre-existing, unrelated genes. The take-home lesson is that this is certainly not the kind of process we would expect to build the astonishingly elegant machinery of the cell. If random mutation plus selective pressure substantially trashes the human genome, why should we think that it would be a constructive force in the long term? There is no reason to think so. — Michael J. Behe

There's always a strange feeling you get when you come across one particular line by chance. It feels somehow significant. That's irrational of course, but humans are irrational creatures. Even the sturdiest, most down-to-earth chap will turn pale if he opens a book at random and sees the words PREPARE TO MEET THY DEATH. — Mark Forsyth