“The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale.”
Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author
Part One, Entropy, Randomness, Disorder, Uncertainty, p. 57
Fortune's Formula (2005)
“The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale.”
Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author
Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) American writer and scientist
"The Home Builder Conserves" [1928]; Published in The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays by Aldo Leopold, Susan L. Flader and J. Baird Callicott (eds.) 1991, p. 147.
1920s
“One good song with a message can bring a point more deeply to more people than a thousand rallies.”
Phil Ochs (1940–1976) American protest singer and songwriter
Statement in Broadside magazine (1962), quoted in Songs of the Vietnam Conflict (2001) by James E. Perone, p. 19
Ronald Fisher (1890–1962) English statistician, evolutionary biologist, geneticist, and eugenicist
Retrospect of criticisms of the theory of natural selection. In Evolution as a Process, eds. J.S.Huxley, A.C.Hardy and E.B.Ford, London: Allen and Unwin, 1954.
1950s
“Quality is conformance to requirements - nothing more, nothing less.”
Philip B. Crosby (1926–2001) Quality guru
Philip B. Crosby (1979), as cited in: Colin Morgan and Stephen Murgatroyd (1994), Total Quality Management In The Public Sector.
“Perhaps the less we have, the more we are required to brag.”
John Steinbeck book East of Eden
Source: East of Eden
“Everyone is more or less mad on one point.”
Rudyard Kipling book Plain Tales from the Hills
On the Strength of a Likeness.
Plain Tales from the Hills (1888)
Thomas Pynchon book Gravity's Rainbow
Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
Hans Christian von Baeyer (1938) American physicist
Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 4, Counting Bits, The scientific measure of information, p. 28
David Bowie (1947–2016) British musician, actor, record producer and arranger
"I Can't Give Everything Away"
Song lyrics, Blackstar (2016)