Quotes about accident
page 3

Peter Greenaway photo
Bob Dylan photo

“Somebody got lucky, but it was an accident.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, Blonde on Blonde (1966), Pledging My Time

Joseph Gurney Cannon photo
Roberto Clemente photo
Jared Polis photo

“I rise today to commemorate one of the most fateful days in the history of the State of Colorado, the day the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant outside of Boulder nearly became America's own Chernobyl, some 30 years before that terrible accident in the Ukraine.”

Jared Polis (1975) American entrepreneur, philanthropist, and US Representative

Jared Polis, "Commemorating the Rocky Flats 1969 Fire", Congressional Record, May 12, 2009.

Octavia E. Butler photo
Larry Wall photo

“I think it's a new feature. Don't tell anyone it was an accident.”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

On s/foo/bar/eieio [10911@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV, 1991]
Usenet postings, 1991

Gloria Estefan photo
R. A. Lafferty photo
James Freeman Clarke photo
Mike Rosen photo

“I hate people, who force their way through at traffic accidents to see blood. They…rape and dismember virgins, and have orgies.”

Günter Brus (1938) Austrian artist

Source: Nervous Stillness on the Horizon (2006), P. 25 (1962) (Brus,letter,January 1962;cited inVon der Aktions Malerai zum Aktionismus:Wien 1960-1965,op.cit., p. 194.)

Peter Sloterdijk photo
Shashi Tharoor photo
Donald A. Norman photo
Ron Paul photo

“The American people have been offered two lousy choices. One, which is corporatism, a fascist type of approach, or, socialism. We deliver a lot of services in this country through the free market, and when you do it through the free market prices go down. But in medicine, prices go up. Technology doesn't help the cost, it goes up instead of down. But if you look at almost all of our industries that are much freer, technology lowers the prices. Just think of how the price of cell phones goes down. Poor people have cell phones, and televisions, and computers. Prices all go down. But in medicine, they go up, and there's a reason for that, that's because the government is involved with it… I do [think that prices will go down without government involvement], but probably a lot more than what you're thinking about, because you have to have competition in the delivery of care. For instance, if you have a sore throat and you have to come see me, you have to wait in the waiting room, and then get checked, and then get a prescription, and it ends up costing you $100. If you had true competition, you should be able to go to a nurse, who could for 1/10 the cost very rapidly do it, and let her give you a prescription for penicillin. See, the doctors and the medical profession have monopolized the system through licensing. And that's not an accident, because they like the idea that you have to go see the physician and pay this huge price. And patients can sort this out, they're not going to go to a nurse if they need brain surgery…”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Interview by Laura Knoy on NHPR, June 5, 2007 http://info.nhpr.org/node/13016
2000s, 2006-2009

James Fenimore Cooper photo

“It is probable a true history of human events would show that a far larger proportion of our acts are the results of sudden impulses and accident, than of that reason of which we so much boast.”

The Pilot: A Tale of the Sea http://www.amazon.com/The-Pilot-A-Tale-Sea/dp/1490555811 (1829); Preface
The Pilot: A Tale of the Sea (1823)

Elvis Costello photo
Cesare Pavese photo
Dejan Stojanovic photo

“Accidents are not accidents but precise arrivals at the wrong right time.”

Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman

Being Late http://www.poetrysoup.com/famous/poem/21366/Being_Late
From the poems written in English

Tom Cruise photo

“My father likes to talk about the stroller accident that resulted in me becoming a Republican.”

Mike Murphy (political consultant) (1962) American political consultant

As quoted in "Romney guru thrives in political 'show business'" https://web.archive.org/web/20060307070315/http://www.boston.com:80/news/politics/president/articles/2005/06/12/romney_guru_thrives_in_political_show_business/?page=full (12 June 2005), by Brian C. Mooney, The Boston Globe
2000s

William Jones photo
Alfred Binet photo

“By following up this idea, also, we might go a little further. We might arrive at the conviction that our present science is human, petty, and contingent; that it is closely linked with the structure of our sensory organs; that this structure results from the evolution which fashioned these organs; that this evolution has been an accident of history; that in the future it may be different; and that, consequently, by the side or in the stead of our modern science, the work of our eyes and hands—and also of our words—there might have been constituted, there may still be constituted, sciences entirely and extraordinarily new—auditory, olfactory, and gustatory sciences, and even others derived from other kinds of sensations which we can neither foresee nor conceive because they are not, for the moment, differentiated in us. Outside the matter we know, a very special matter fashioned of vision and touch, there may exist other matter with totally different properties. …We must, by setting aside the mechanical theory, free ourselves from a too narrow conception of the constitution of matter. And this liberation will be to us a great advantage which we shall soon reap. We shall avoid the error of believing that mechanics is the only real thing and that all that cannot be explained by mechanics must be incomprehensible. We shall then gain more liberty of mind for understanding what the union of the soul with the body may be.”

Alfred Binet (1857–1911) French psychologist and inventor of the first usable intelligence test

Source: The Mind and the Brain, 1907, p. 43

Fritz Leiber photo
TotalBiscuit photo

“"Oh, fair maiden… If only I could fix the voids that exist in your fair…visage… Ugh!" [laughs incredulously] "That's one hell of a makeup accident."”

TotalBiscuit (1984–2018) British game commentator

WTF Is…? series, Guise of the Wolf (January 26, 2014)

Eugène Delacroix photo
Thomas Edison photo

“I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come indirectly through accident, except the phonograph. No, when I have, fully decided that a result is worth getting, I go about it, and make trial after trial, until it comes.”

Thomas Edison (1847–1931) American inventor and businessman

Quoted by Theodore Dreiser in A Photographic Talk with Edison http://books.google.com/books?id=ZrIYCWaZCjwC&q=%22I+never+did+anything+worth+doing+by+accident%22+%22nor+did+any+of+my+inventions+come+indirectly+through+accident+except+the+phonograph+No+when+I+have+fully+decided+that+a+result+is+worth+getting+I+go+about+it+and+make+trial+after+trial+until+it+comes%22&pg=PA118#v=onepage, Success magazine (February 1898).
1800s

John Napier photo
Richard Evelyn Byrd photo
Slavoj Žižek photo
Jerome Corsi photo

“Isn't the Democratic Party the official SODOMIZER PROTECTION ASSOCIATION of AMERICA -- oh, I forgot, it was just an accident that Clintoon's first act in office was to promote "gays in the military." RAGHEADS are Boy-Bumpers as clearly as they are Women-Haters -- it all goes together.”

Jerome Corsi (1946) American conservative author

" Who is Jerome Corsi, co-author of Swift Boat Vets attack book?" http://mediamatters.org/items/200408060010, Media Matters for America (2004-08-06)

Lester del Rey photo
Pat Sajak photo
Ray Comfort photo
Peter Medawar photo
Maimónides photo
Paul Simon photo

“There were incidents and accidents
There were hints and allegations…”

Paul Simon (1941) American musician, songwriter and producer

You Can Call Me Al
Song lyrics, Graceland (1986)

Daniel Dennett photo
Jacob Bronowski photo
Jerry Fodor photo
Bono photo

“We can be the generation that no longer accepts that an accident of latitude determines whether a child lives or dies. But will we be that generation?”

Bono (1960) Irish rock musician, singer of U2

Foreword to The End of Poverty (2005) by Jeffrey Sachs

Edward Hopper photo

“There will be, I think, an attempt to grasp again the surprise and accidents of nature and a more intimate and sympathetic study of its moods, together with a renewed wonder and humility on the part of such as are still capable of these basic reactions.”

Edward Hopper (1882–1967) prominent American realist painter and printmaker

Alfred Barr & Edward Hopper: Retrospective Exhibition Museum of Modern Art New York 1933
1911 - 1940, Notes on Painting - Edward Hopper (1933)

Edmund White photo

“It seemed strange to me that someone who painted big, scary abstractions should have been so commonsensical in her literary tastes, though later I would discover that twelve-tone composers read Keats just as experimental poets listened to Glenn Miller — few people are avant-garde outside their own domain.I suppose that as Midwesterners, the children of chemical engineers and homemakers, we experienced the arts as so foreign, even so preposterously unreasonable, that once we’d decided to embrace them we did so with lots of conviction and little discrimination. Surely it was no accident that T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, the two great poetic synthesists of our day, the very men who had ransacked all of world culture and could refer in the same poem to the Buddha and to Sophocles or to Confucius and to Jefferson — it was no accident that they were both from the heartland. Public-library intellectuals, magpies of knowledge, like most autodidacts we were incapable of evaluating our sources. As a teen-ager, I tried to write verse like Milton’s; later, I wanted to write novels like Nabokov’s. In a novel I wrote in college, I imitated Evelyn Waugh. If someone had said to me, "But do you, the graceless son of a Cincinnati broker of chemical equipment, do you seriously imagine that you can just write a Renaissance Christian epic or something in the style of a Cambridge-educated Russian aristocrat or of the spokesman of the Bright Young Things of London circa 1925?"”

Edmund White (1940) American novelist and LGBT essayist

if someone had spoken like this to me, I wouldn’t even have understood his point.
My Women.The New Yorker https://archive.is/20121204150452/www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/050613fa_fact 6 June 2005
Articles and Interviews

Tom McCarthy (writer) photo
Walter Pater photo

“A book, like a person, has its fortunes with one; is lucky or unlucky in the precise moment of its falling in our way, and often by some happy accident counts with us for something more than its independent value.”

Walter Pater (1839–1894) essayist, art and literature critic, fiction writer

Source: Marius the Epicurean http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/8mrs110.txt (1885), Ch. 6

Charles Stross photo
David Lloyd George photo
Jackson Pollock photo

“Technic is the result of a need new needs demand new technics total control denial of the accident States of order organic intensity energy and motion made visible memories arrested in space, human needs and motives acceptance”

Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) American artist

Quote around 1948-'49; as cited in Abstract Expressionism (1990), David Anfam, p. 121
Pollock wrote this text on the back of a photo of himself taken in his own studio.
1940's

Robert Hunter (author) photo
Sergey Lavrov photo

“It is no accident that the Office of UN High Commissioner on Human Rights stated today that all circumstances of his (Gaddafi's) death must be investigated and I fully agree that such an investigation will be conducted.”

Sergey Lavrov (1950) Russian politician and Foreign Minister

Source: He said that Muammar Gaddafi's death should be investigated, as he shouldn't have been killed, (October 2011) http://rt.com/politics/lavrov-interview-russia-libya-us-439/

Gloria Estefan photo

“Ever since I was a little girl, I felt that I wanted to be of service here on the earth: I felt that was my job somehow. And whatever I was going to do, I was going to find a way to do that. And so, as I got a larger audience -- a broader audience worldwide, and more and more people were listening to me -- it became important for me to share that thought. And the song "Get on Your Feet" -- which I didn't write, it was written actually by my guitar player, bass player and keyboardist... They knew how I felt. [They knew] what my thoughts were... So although it was written before my accident, it was thrown back at me so many times... But that really is my motto. I look always forward. I look ahead. And that's why I chose to record that song, because I really loved the message. Then "Coming Out of the Dark," which came on the heals of that accident and my rehab, and the incredible love that I felt from everyone worldwide that helped me through that difficult moment when I broke my back in 1990, is a big thank you to my fans -- and an expression of how ultimately we are here for each other to help one another. And the strength of prayer... That's why I say I know the love that saved me, you're sharing with me. We do have the power to save one another... And I wanted to thank everyone for being there for me.”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

iTunes interview (released June 2, 2007)
2007

Thomas Jackson photo

“Be not disturbed at trifles, nor at accidents, common or unavoidable.”

Thomas Jackson (1824–1863) Confederate general

Misattributed, Jackson's personal book of maxims

Freeman Dyson photo
Brian W. Aldiss photo

“Man was an accident on this world or it would have been made better for him!”

Source: Hothouse (1962), Chapter 18

John Lancaster Spalding photo

“Since the mass of mankind are too ignorant or too indolent to think seriously, if majorities are right it is by accident.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 130

Douglas Adams photo
Clifford D. Simak photo
Grant Morrison photo

“When Nietzsche said God is dead, he forgot to mention that Satan died in the same horrific accident.”

Grant Morrison (1960) writer

http://uk.comics.ign.com/articles/950/950703p4.html
On life

Jerry Seinfeld photo
James Comey photo
Arthur Schopenhauer photo

“Just as the witticism brings two very different real objects under one concept, the pun brings two different concepts, by the assistance of accident, under one word.”

Volume I, Book I http://books.google.com/books?id=US0bhPS4h2UC&pg=PA79
The World as Will and Representation (1819; 1844; 1859)

Dominic Purcell photo
Joseph Strutt photo
Joseph Addison photo
Daniel Handler photo
Kin Hubbard photo
Tibor Fischer photo
Marvin Minsky photo
F. E. Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead photo

“May I be perfectly candid? I also am still a Unionist in this sense. If I were certified of twenty years of unbroken power in this country, I am still most clearly of opinion that the solution of the Irish question which would be best for England and best for Ireland would be the prosecution during that period of the policy which, in our opinion at least, had attained so large a measure of success in the year 1906. In saying this I make it quite plain that I am conscious that there are many of my colleagues—there must be many of my colleagues—who would not take that view. You must make the reservation that you are given that power and that you are given that power for the requisite period. The late Lord Salisbury spoke of "twenty years of resolute government." The Unionist Party, in the period to the close of which I refer, had been given some ten years, and it was only given those ten years by what many members of this House would describe as the accident of the issue, with its repercussion on the Election, of the war in South Africa. That accident and that Election gave the Unionist Party some ten years of office. Is it not evident, in trying to descry what lies in front of us through the mists of the future, that no man living can claim that twenty years, or anything like twenty years, lie in front of any Party that believes in the maintenance of the relations between Ireland and this country on the lines that have existed since the passing of the Act of Union?”

F. E. Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead (1872–1930) British politician

Speech in the House of Lords http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1920/nov/23/government-of-ireland-bill on the Government of Ireland Bill (23 November 1920).

Peter Greenaway photo

“I have an accident about every two years, and one day it won't be an accident!”

Edie Sedgwick (1943–1971) Socialite, actress, model

Edie : Girl On Fire (2006)

José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero photo

“Given that a few days ago we had a terrible accident, a tragic terrorist attack in Barajas, in Madrid, I would like to propose to you that we show our complete condemnation, our most intense revulsion, and that we show profound solidarity with the victims.”

José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (1960) Former Prime Minister of Spain

In reference to the ETA bombing at Madrid airport, El Confidencial http://www.elconfidencial.com/noticias/noticia.asp?id=20607 (Spanish). That same day, Zapatero said that calling the attack an 'accident' had been a slip of the tongue, but it was seized by the press and provoked anger, for example the slogan "Killing people is not an accident" used in the protests of March, 2007.
As President, 2006

Philip K. Dick photo
Joseph Strutt photo
Joel Mokyr photo
Margaret Mead photo

“Fathers are biological necessities, but social accidents.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Attributed in Two Hugs for Survival (1982) by Harold A. Minden (1982), p. 22
1980s

G. K. Chesterton photo
Richard Dawkins photo

“I can think of no moral objection to eating human road kills except for the ones that you mentioned like 'what would the relatives think about it?' and 'would the person themselves have wanted it to happen?', but I do worry a bit about slippery slopes; possibly a little bit more than you do.There are barriers that we have set up in our minds and certainly the barrier between Homo sapiens and any other species is an artificial barrier in the sense that its a kind of 'accident' that the evolutionary intermediates happen to be extinct. Never the less it exists and natural barriers that are there can be useful for preventing slippery slopes and therefore I think I can see an objection to breaching such a barrier because you are then in a weaker position to stop people going further.Another example might be suppose you take the argument in favour of abortion up until the baby was one year old, if a baby was one year old and turned out to have some horrible incurable disease that meant it was going to die in agony in later life, what about infanticide? Strictly morally I can see no objection to that at all, I would be in favour of infanticide but I think i would worry about/I think I would wish at least to give consideration to the person who says 'where does it end?'”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

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Peter Singer - The Genius of Darwin: The Uncut Interviews (2009)

Alexandre Dumas photo
Jerome David Salinger photo
Paul Karl Feyerabend photo
Carl Friedrich Gauss photo

“In such apparent accidents which finally produce such a decisive influence on one s whole life, one is inclined to recognize the tools of a higher hand. The great enigma of life never becomes clear to us here below.”

Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) German mathematician and physical scientist

In a letter dated April 25, 1825. As quoted in Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science (1955) by Guy Waldo Dunnington. p. 361

Giordano Bruno photo
Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield photo

“The chapter of knowledge is a very short, but the chapter of accidents is a very long one.”

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield (1694–1773) British statesman and man of letters

To Solomon Dayrolles (16 February 1753)

Kevin Warwick photo

“I was born human. But this was an accident of fate - a condition merely of time and place. I believe it's something we have the power to change.”

Kevin Warwick (1954) British robotics and cybernetics researcher

in Kevin Warwick "Cyborg 1.0", Wired, pp.145-151, February 2000.