“Accidents did not just happen. From time to time they were carefully plotted, calculated, and arranged to one’s advantage-all, of course, under the cloak of happenstance.”

— Jodi Picoult , book The Pact

Source: The Pact

Last update Nov. 24, 2022. History

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Jodi Picoult 595

Author 1966

Michael Kurland book The Unicorn Girl

Source: The Unicorn Girl (1969), Chapter 2 (p. 22)
Kurland is actually quoting here from Ian Fleming’s novel Goldfinger

“Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.”

Ian Fleming book Goldfinger

Variant: Mr Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: 'Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action'.
Source: Auric Goldfinger, Ch. 14 : Things That Go Thump In The Night

“You think that just because it's already happened, the past is finished and unchangeable? Oh no, the past is cloaked in multicolored taffeta and every time we look at it we see a different hue.”

Milan Kundera (1929–2023) Czech author of Czech and French literature

Source: Life is Elsewhere

“This lesson was firmly in the minds of those who made the American Constitution. They proposed to adopt institutions under which the people should be supreme, and the government should derive its just powers from the consent of the governed. They were determined to be a sovereign people under a government having such powers as they from time to time should confer upon it by a written constitution. They did not propose to be under the tyranny of either the executive or the legislature.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Ordered Liberty and World Peace (1924)

“You're doing calculations all the time.”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

On the game of bridge, as quoted in Forbes (2 June 1997); also quoted in The Warren Buffett Portfolio: Mastering the Power of the Focus Investment Strategy (2000), p. 112
Context: It’s a game of a million inferences. There are a lot of things to draw inferences from — cards played and not played. These inferences tell you something about the probabilities. It's got to be the best intellectual exercise out there. You're seeing through new situations every ten minutes. Bridge is about weighing gain/loss ratios. You're doing calculations all the time.