Uncaused Events Quotes & Sayings

Thread count is actually a lie. Just because a thread count is 1,500 on a set of sheets doesn't mean that they're well-made sheets. Truly, the quality of the cotton and the quality of the way something is woven is much more important than thread count. — Nate Berkus

Quantum events have a way of just happening, without any cause, as when a radioactive atom decays at a random time. Even the quantum vacuum is not an inert void, but is boiling with quantum fluctuations. In our macroscopic world, we are used to energy conservation, but in the quantum realm this holds only on average. Energy fluctuations out of nothing create short-lived particle-antiparticle pairs, which is why the vacuum is not emptiness but a sea of transient particles. An uncaused beginning, even out of nothing, for spacetime is no great leap of the imagination. — Taner Edis

Free will is an idealization of human beings that makes the ethics game playable. Euclidean geometry requires idealizations like infinite straight lines and perfect circles, and its deductions are sound and useful even though the world does not really have infinite straight lines or perfect circles. The world is close enough to the idealization that the theorems can usefully be applied. Similarly, ethical theory requires idealizations like free, sentient, rational, equivalent agents whose behavior is uncaused, and its conclusions can be sound and useful even though the world, as seen by science, does not really have uncaused events. As long as there is no outright coercion or gross malfunction of reasoning, the world is close enough to the idealization of free will that moral theory can meaningfully be applied to it. — Steven Pinker

His attention. Sweet and intense at the same time. Like a barley sugar I could untwist from its plastic and hold in my mouth. A flood of secret pleasure. — Alexis Hall

I'm very curious to meet a guy who makes you completely forsake the scientific method in favor of unfounded supposition and speculation."
"It's called intuition! — Rosemary Clement-Moore

Your emotions are very unstable and should never be the foundation for direction in your life. — Joyce Meyer

Once you've chosen a man, don't try to change him', I wrote with more confidence. 'It can't be done. More important-don't let him try to change you. — Diana Gabaldon

When you study great teachers ... you will learn much more from their caring and hard work than from their style. — William Glasser

Without accepting the other person's thinking, you cannot further your own interest. You need the other's help to get results. — Harri Holkeri

What was really wonderful about the 'Doubtfire' shoot is that we had this really long rehearsal period in the beginning. That was a great time to get to know each other. We got to know each other and to create the family vibe. So we really didn't have to force it. — Lisa Jakub

Nothing matters in this goddamned lunatic asylum of a world but dough. — William Lindsay Gresham

One of the most dangerous things that can happen to a child is to kill or torture an animal an get away with it. — Margaret Mead

To talk intelligibly about modern physics, we have to admit the possibility of uncaused events. — Taner Edis

People have a hard time going to a club and seeing this business tool on stage that's wholly indicative of everything that rock is not. Rock is not about sitting in an office setting up documents, yet they see someone on stage doing that. — Keith Fullerton Whitman

Perhaps randomness is not merely an adequate description for complex causes that we cannot specify. Perhaps the world really works this way, and many events are uncaused in any conventional sense of the word. Perhaps our gut feeling that it cannot be so reflects only our hopes and prejudices, our desperate striving to make sense of a complex and confusing world, and not the ways of nature. — Stephen Jay Gould

Convenient though it would be if it were true, Mozilla [Netscape 1.0] is not big because it's full of useless crap. Mozilla is big because your needs are big. Your needs are big because the Internet is big. There are lots of small, lean web browsers out there that, incidentally, do almost nothing useful. But being a shining jewel of perfection was not a goal when we wrote Mozilla. — Jamie Zawinski

Funny word, that: "fault." As in San Andreas. The crack through which one world intersects with the next, or vice versa. This crack in my head, still gaping open--a magnet, a haematoma, a dark and spreading pool. A cigarette-burn hole in the fabric of everything I see, or hear, or do; right in the middle, impossible to mend, impossible to disguise. Impossible to ignore. — Gemma Files