Randomly Selected Quotes & Sayings

Allow me to introduce myself. I am a traitor and an idiot. Also, my mother should have aborted me and left me in a dumpster, but since she didn't, I should 'off' myself. Those are a few nuggets randomly selected from thousands of e-mails written in response to my column suggesting that Sarah Palin is out of her league and should step down. Who says public discourse hasn't deteriorated? — Kathleen Parker

Members of the Athenian assemblies were chosen by lot, a method meant to protect the system from degeneracy. Luckily, this effect has been investigated with modern political systems. In a computer simulation, Alessandro Pluchino and his colleagues showed how adding a certain number of randomly selected politicians to the process can improve the functioning of the parliamentary system. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I am a big supporter of experiments to complement representative gov't with randomly selected representative bodies of citizens, sure. I think most Americans would be surprised to learn just how much better we are at gov't than our gov't. — Lawrence Lessig

I didn't see myself as the busty type. Too bad bodies are issued randomly, not selected to match your personality — Phoebe Kitanidis

There are plenty of violent people, but for any randomly selected person today the chances of meeting a violent death at the hands of his or her fellow humans is lower now than it has ever been in human history. — Peter Singer

My show is constantly evolving ... new tricks are added, old ones are dropped ... so it stays fresh. But it's the randomly selected participants from the audience that make it fresh and provide some of the best comic relief. — David Copperfield

Another way in which religion betrays itself, and attempts to escape mere reliance on faith and instead offer "evidence" in the sense normally understood, is by the argument from revelation. On certain very special occasions, it is asserted, the divine will was made known by direct contact with randomly selected human beings, who were supposedly vouchsafed unalterable laws that could then be passed on to those less favored. — Christopher Hitchens

The Japanese tend to be far more co-operative and docile and group-oriented. It would be easier to get the entire population of Tokyo to wear matching outfits than to get any two randomly selected Americans to agree on pizza toppings. — Dave Barry

We trust people's lives to randomly selected juries as the only fair method; should we use any less fair method for a nation or a planet? — Peter J. Carroll

In a devastating critique, the sociologist Pitirim Sorokin once showed that if Terman had simply put together a randomly selected group of children from the same kinds of family backgrounds as the Termites - and — Malcolm Gladwell

The tomato crop growth variables were measured manually in eight plants randomly located in the greenhouse [339]. The following measurements were taken at a frequency of 8 days: Number of nodes, number of nodes of the first bunch, flower birth, curdle of fruits, number of nodes within the first fruit, number of nodes with the curdle of the first fruit, and its growth dynamics. On the other hand, six different plants were selected every 23 days to measure the leaf area, dry weight, and biomass of the different plant elements (roots, stems, leaves, flowers, and fruits), where destructive methods were used to estimate their values. — Francisco Rodriguez

I'm all for experimenting with sortition - randomly selected representative bodies of citizens. But I don't favor direct democracy. We're busy. We have lives. There is reddit. Who has time to work out the right answer to the thousand policy choices a gov't must make all the time? — Lawrence Lessig

Look at any randomly selected piece of your world. Encoded deep in the biology of every cell in every blade of grass, in every insect's wing, in every bacterium cell, is the history of the third planet from the Sun in a Solar System making its way lethargically around a galaxy called the Milky Way. Its shape, form, function, colour, smell, taste, molecular structure, arrangement of atoms, sequence of bases, and possibilities for the future are all absolutely unique. There is nowhere else in the observable Universe where you will see precisely that little clump of emergent, living complexity. It is wonderful. — Brian Cox