“Statistically speaking, there is a 65 percent chance that the love of your life is having an affair. Be very suspicious.”

“Statistically speaking, there's a better chance that some part of me will go on to greatness somewhere in the world. I'd rather be partly great than entirely useless.”

“… the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. [pp. 65-66]”

“If I give you a forty five percent chance at lethal injection, a fifty percent chance at the electric chair, and a five percent chance for escape which are you going to vote for? The electric chair, because you're likely to win?”

“Let's go out and buy a statistically average meal from a large multinational restaurant chain. That usually fixes about seventy-five percent of life's problems.”

“Your life story is a novel; and people, though they love novels wound between two yellow paper covers, are oddly suspicious of those which come to them in living vellum.”

“Persistence isn’t very glamorous. If genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration, then as a culture we tend to lionize the 1 percent. We love its flash and dazzle. But great power lies in the other 99 percent.”

“Violence has to become a part of your thinking. It makes you cautious, suspicious as hell, and lengthens your life expectancy.”

“Statistics are silly unless given context. If you have one foot in fire, the other in ice, can we legitimately say that, on average, you're warm? Hardly. Probabilities, in this case the chance that any one of us will die-by-Muslim, are statistically insignificant—unless this happens to you or to yours, to me or mine.”

“You speak and preach of the life of love. But you have not.”