Quotes about accident (655 quotes, page 4)

“Generally speaking, all the really great ideas of physics are really spin-offs of string theory… Some of them were discovered first, but I consider that a mere accident of the development on planet earth.”

Edward Witten (1951) American theoretical physicist

as quoted by John Horgan, The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age (1996)
Context: Generally speaking, all the really great ideas of physics are really spin-offs of string theory... Some of them were discovered first, but I consider that a mere accident of the development on planet earth. On planet earth, they were discovered in this order [general relativity, quantum field theory, superstrings, and supersymmetry]... But I don't believe, if there are many civilizations in the universe, that those four ideas were discovered in that order in each civilization.

Idea

“And whereas many men, by accident unevitable, become unable to maintain themselves by their labour; they ought not to be left to the Charity of private persons; but to be provided for, (as far-forth as the necessities of Nature require,) by the Lawes of the Common-wealth. For as it is Unchariablenesse in any man, to neglect the impotent; so it is in the Soveraign of a Common-wealth, to expose them to the hazard of such uncertain Charity.”

Thomas Hobbes book Leviathan

The Second Part, Chapter 30, p. 181
Leviathan (1651)

Men , Law , Nature , Personality

“Watching the painter painting
And all the time, the light is changing
And he keeps painting
That bit there, it was an accident
But he's so pleased
It's the best mistake, he could make
And it's my favourite piece.
It's just great.”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, Aerial (2005), A Sky of Honey (Disc 2)

Light , Change , Time , Painting

“What has caused confusion and misunderstanding about his Hinduism is the concept of sarva-dharma-samabhAva (equal regard for all religions) which he had developed after deep reflection. Christian and Muslim missionaries have interpreted it to mean that a Hindu can go aver to Christianity or Islam without suffering any spiritual loss. They are also using it as a shield against every critique of their closed and aggressive creeds. The new rulers of India, on the other hand, cite it in order to prop up the Nehruvian version of Secularism which is only a euphemism for anti-Hindu animus shared in common by Christians, Muslims, Marxists and those who are Hindus only by accident of birth. For Gandhiji, however, sarva-dharma-samabhAva was only a restatement of the age-old Hindu tradition of tolerance in matters of belief. Hinduism has always adjudged a man’s faith in terms of his AdhAra (receptivity) and adhikAra (aptitude). It has never prescribed a uniform system of belief or behavior for everyone because, according to it, different persons are in different stages of spiritual development and need different prescriptions for further progress. Everyone, says Hinduism, should be left alone to work out one’s own salvation through one’s own inner seeking and evolution. Any imposition of belief or behaviour from the outside is, therefore, a mechanical exercise which can only do injury to one’s spiritual growth. Preaching to those who have not invited it is nothing short of aggression born out of self-righteousness. That is why Gandhiji took a firm and uncompromising stand against proselytisation by preaching and gave no quarters to the Christian mission’s mercenary methods of spreading the gospel.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

History of Hindu-Christian Encounters (1996)

Age , Faith , Religion , Behavior

“For war is never some cosmic accident descending upon a people with all the chance and inevitability of asteroids falling like fire out of the heavens, but only the will and work of man.”

David Zindell (1952) American writer

Source: The Wild (1995), p. 523

War , People , Chance

“You should only alienate folks when you mean and want to do it. […] It should never be an accident.”

Nancy Werlin (1961) author

Locked Inside, p. 28 (2000)

“The convulsive hold which Mary to this day maintains over human imagination,— as you can see at Lourdes,— was due much less to her power of saving soul or body than to her sympathy with people who suffered under law,— divine or human,— justly or unjustly, by accident or design, by decree of God or by guile of Devil. She cared not a straw for conventional morality, and she had no notion of letting her friends be punished, to the tenth or any other generation, for the sins of their ancestors or the peccadillos of Eve.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

God , People , Law , Soul

“I think the ideas [as starting point for his paintings] are based upon very obvious physical facts – notions that are also simple-minded, such as, in the 'White Paintings', wanting to know if that was a thing to do or not, or in 'Factum', wondering about what the role of accident is. Those aren't really very involved ideas.”

Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) American artist

1960's, I never thought of it as much of an ability,' (1968)

Idea , Thinking , Painting

“You know what's hard? I want to give back. I want to do all the things that will make me feel fulfilled. But whenever I do those things, people think it's a press stunt or something. Because they do find me, and there's really no way of hiding from that. And the second that you complain about it, they say, "Well, this is what you wanted, so this is what you're going to get." That's all people see it as now. It's not, "No, I just want to have some time for myself." There are things I want to do, and people don't understand that. You know, my car accident that I got into, where I got my first charge, I wouldn't have been speeding up like I was if I didn't have people shoving cameras in my windows.”

Lindsay Lohan (1986) American actress and pop singer

Interview interview (2009)

People , Cars , Way , Feeling

“It's true that the average human in the Xeelee universe can't eat Jell-O with a straw without accident[al]ly removing an eye but these particular humans start off no stupider than than any other human of their era and proceed to breed themselves into imbecility. Well, farther into imbecility.”

James Nicoll (1961) Canadian fiction reviewer

[cvo12q$oii$1@reader2.panix.com, 2005]
2000s

Stupidity , Lying , Universe

“we have heard as yet only the proceedings of the first day of Burr’s trial, which from the favor of the Marshal and judge promises him all which can depend on them. A grand jury of two federalists, four (Tertium) Quids and ten republicans does not seem to be a fair representation of the state of Virginia. But all this will shew the original error of establishing a judiciary independant of the nation, and which, from the citadel of the law can turn it’s guns on those they were meant to defend, and controul and fashion their proceedings to it’s own will. I have always entertained a high opinion of the Marshal’s integrity and political correctness. But, in a state where there are not more than eight Quids, how five of them should have been summoned on one jury is difficult to explain from accident.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to John W. Eppes (28 May 1807) https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/99-01-02-5646
1800s, Second Presidential Administration (1805-1809)

Law , Error , Fashion , Dependency

“First Theory.—There is no Providence at all for anything in the Universe; all parts of the Universe, the heavens and what they contain, owe their origin to accident and chance; there exists no being that rules and governs them or provides for them. This is the theory of Epicurus…”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.17

Universe , Chance , Parting

“This stretch of the Thames from London Bridge to the Albert Docks is to other watersides of river ports what a virgin forest would be to a garden. It is a thing grown up, not made. It recalls a jungle by the confused, varied, and impenetrable aspect of the buildings that line the shore, not according to a planned purpose, but as if sprung up by accident from scattered seeds. Like the matted growth of bushes and creepers veiling the silent depths of an unexplored wilderness, they hide the depths of London’s infinitely varied, vigorous, seething life. In other river ports it is not so. They lie open to their stream, with quays like broad clearings, with streets like avenues cut through thick timber for the convenience of trade… But London, the oldest and greatest of river ports, does not possess as much as a hundred yards of open quays upon its river front. Dark and impenetrable at night, like the face of a forest, is the London waterside. It is the waterside of watersides, where only one aspect of the world’s life can be seen, and only one kind of men toils on the edge of the stream. The lightless walls seem to spring from the very mud upon which the stranded barges lie; and the narrow lanes coming down to the foreshore resemble the paths of smashed bushes and crumbled earth where big game comes to drink on the banks of tropical streams.Behind the growth of the London waterside the docks of London spread out unsuspected, smooth, and placid, lost amongst the buildings like dark lagoons hidden in a thick forest. They lie concealed in the intricate growth of houses with a few stalks of mastheads here and there overtopping the roof of some four-story warehouse.”

Joseph Conrad book The Mirror of the Sea

London Bridge to the Royal Albert Dock
The Mirror of the Sea (1906), On the River Thames, Ch. 16

Life , Men , Lie , World

“This means that if in a city seven accidents occur each week, then (assuming that all possible distributions are equally likely) practically all weeks will contain days with two or more accidents, and on the average only one week out of 165 will show a uniform distribution of one accident per day.”

William Feller (1906–1970) Croatian-American mathematician

Source: An Introduction To Probability Theory And Its Applications (Third Edition), Chapter II, Elements Of Combinatorial Analysis, p. 32.

“Oxygen is an accident. Breath is intentional.”

Erwan Le Corre (1971)

“This happened by accident," [Referring to his long hair] "I didn't get round to having a haircut for a while, and when it got long I thought it looked cool. I don't want anyone to change me. And hopefully, one day, I'll be known as the great child singer who developed into a great adult singer. That would be so cool.”

Joseph McManners (1992) British singer, actor

Interview with British Newspaper The Mirror http://www.mirror.co.uk:

Change

“On May 7, a few weeks after the accident at Three-Mile Island, I was in Washington. I was there to refute some of that propaganda that Ralph Nader, Jane Fonda and their kind are spewing to the news media in their attempt to frighten people away from nuclear power. I am 71 years old, and I was working 20 hours a day. The strain was too much. The next day, I suffered a heart attack. You might say that I was the only one whose health was affected by that reactor near Harrisburg. No, that would be wrong. It was not the reactor. It was Jane Fonda. Reactors are not dangerous.”

Edward Teller (1908–2003) Hungarian-American nuclear physicist

2 page advertisement sponsored by Dresser Industries in the Wall Street Journal (31 July 1979)

People , Health , Suffering , Heart

“One could never remember himself in eternity by the mere fact of having loved or hated any more than by that of having thirsted; love and hate have no more individuality in them than single waves in the ocean;—but the accidents or trivial marks which distinguished those whom we loved or hated make their memory our own forever, and with it that of our own personality also.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) Poet, essayist, physician

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

Love , Hate , Memory , Personality

“It would be the greatest disaster which could befall our House if any untoward accident befall you, which may God avert! Do not hesitate to open letters addressed to me. Your love for me and the absolute confidence between us make me feel that I cannot have any secrets from you.”

William the Silent (1533–1584) stadtholder of Holland, Zeeland and Utrecht, leader of the Dutch Revolt

William talking to his brother John, as quoted in William the Silent (1897) by Frederic Harrison p. 54

Love , God , Secret , Feeling

“Remember that the worst accidents occur in the middle of the road.”

Eugene McCarthy (1916–2005) American politician

From “Ten Commandments for New Hill Members,” in The Washington Post (4 January 1981), as cited in The Official Rules https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0486482103: 5,427 Laws, Principles and Axioms to Help You Cope With Crises, Deadlines, Bad Luck, Rude Behavior, Red Tape and Attacks by Inanimate Objects, Paul Dickson, Courier Corporation (2013), p. 223

“The misleading character of the accident theory is evident from the fact that even now the “error” involved from the standpoint of U. S. policy-makers and American leaders generally is neither one of purpose nor method – it is strictly a case of unexpectedly large expense. For the U. S. leadership, in other words, Vietnam is simply another, painfully large “cost over-run.” In terms of basic U. S. objectives and methods employed, in the Third World – essentially establishment of reliable client states, increasingly managed by military elites, with generous financial and military support (arms, advisors, Green Berets, and more extensive military intervention when junta control is threatened, as in Santo Domingo) – Vietnam is a facet of a completely rational policy. The policy may be vicious and catastrophic, from the perspective of the Vietnamese; and it may be a sordid and disruptive waste of human and material resources from the standpoint of the real interests of the ordinary American; but to the Rostows, Westmorelands and Nixons, the Vietnam War is a noble endeavor (“one of our finest moments”) that we cannot afford to abandon without achieving our original ends. The evidence is compelling that this leadership is entirely capable of destroying every village in Vietnam (and in the process, every Vietnamese) if this is required to attain the original political objectives.”

Edward S. Herman (1925–2017) American journalist

Source: Atrocities in Vietnam: Myths and Realities, 1970, pp. 87-88.

War , World , Error , Support

“Gould's arguments on the quirkiness of human intelligence are not only presented as part of an evolutionary argument, but also I believe to buttress an ideological viewpoint. In brief, his assessment of Man as an evolutionary accident is to lead us into a libertarian attitude whereby, by virtue of a cosmic accident, we, and we alone, have no choice but to take responsibility for our own destiny and mould it to our desire.”

Simon Conway Morris (1951) British palaeontologist

Source: The Crucible of Creation (1998), p. 14.

Intelligence , Parting

“Through all of history and pre-history it has been accepted that there is something wrong with the human animal. Health may be the natural condition of other species, but in humans it is sickness that is normal. To be chronically unwell is part of what it means to be human. It is no accident that every culture has its own versions of therapy. Tribal shamans and modern psychotherapists answer the same needs and practise the same trade.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

Beyond the Last Thought: Freud's cigars and the long way round to Nirvana (p. 84)
The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (2013)

Health , History , Nature , Animals

“There will be ups, there will be downs, there will be sideways. I can just tell you I have been hired, I have been fired, I have been lauded, I have been vilified. I've said some of the most brilliant things that just by accident appeared on my tongue, and I’ve said some of the dumbest things that you could imagine. But each day - even the day that I knew I was going to be fired - I looked forward to because I've always believed that tomorrow was going to be the best day of my life.”

Michael Bloomberg (1942) American businessman and politician, former mayor of New York City

http://ww.tufts.edu/home/feature/?p=commencement2007&p4=4
Optimism

Life , Imagination , Appearance

“Thou cam'st not to thy place by accident,
It is the very place God meant for thee;
And should'st thou there small room for action see,
Do not for this give room for discontent.”

Richard Chenevix Trench (1807–1886) Irish bishop

Sonnet, The Story of Justin Martyr and Other Poems; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 190-92.

God

“Nothing is accidental in the universe — this is one of my Laws of Physics — except the entire universe itself, which is Pure Accident, pure divinity. So it cannot be an accident that I think of you so constantly.”

Joyce Carol Oates (1938) American author

"The Summing Up: Meredith Dawe," Do What You Will (1970)

Law , Thinking , Universe

“Let us not deceive ourselves: our talent profile is nowhere near that of, say, the Jews or the Japanese in America. The exceptional number of Nobel Prize winners who are Jews is no accident. It is also no accident that a high percentage, sometimes 50%, of faculty members in the top American universities on both the east and west coasts are Jews. And the number of high calibre Japanese academics, professionals, and business executives is out of all proportion to the percentage of Japanese in the total American population”

Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015) First Prime Minister of Singapore

The Search for Talent, 12 August 1982 http://www.nas.gov.sg/archivesonline/speeches/record-details/73eb9163-115d-11e3-83d5-0050568939ad
1980s

Business , Universe

“The emergence of the market model in Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Asia is no accident. It is not the product of a corporate conspiracy. It is the consequence of hard lessons learned from cold experience.”

Bob Rae (1948) Canadian politician

Source: The Three Questions - Prosperity and the Public Good (1998), Chapter Two, The First Question: Self Interest and Prosperity, p. 21

Learning

“Though Mitra’s case was different because it was a heart attack, I shudder to think what would have happened if an accident occurs in one of these studios. With no professional medical practitioner in attendance, things became difficult.”

Arin Paul (1980) Indian film director

Interview in Indian Express on Studios of Calcutta http://www.expressindia.com/latest-news/actor-kunal-dies-of-heart-attack-while-on-shoot/413868/(2009)

Thinking , Heart

“I made a hurtful and thoughtless comment on Sunday when I said that "I wanted my life back." When I read that recently, I was appalled. I apologize, especially to the families of the 11 men who lost their lives in this tragic accident.”

Tony Hayward (1957) British businessman

"BP CEO Tony Hayward Issues an Apology for Remarks" https://www.facebook.com/notes/bp-america/bp-ceo-tony-hayward-issues-an-apology-for-remarks/431512288412 on BP America Facebook page, as quoted in Gus Lubin, " BP CEO Tony Hayward Apologizes For His Idiotic Statement: 'I'd Like My Life Back' http://www.businessinsider.com/bp-ceo-tony-hayward-apologizes-for-saying-id-like-my-life-back-2010-6", Business Insider, 2 June 2010

Life , Men , Family , Reading

“To what happy accident is it that we owe so unexpected a visit?”

Oliver Goldsmith book The Vicar of Wakefield

Source: The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), Ch. 19.

Happiness

“It is no accident that, in ancient times many peoples used priestesses (think, for example, of the Greek Sibyls) to enter into relationship with the will of the gods.”

Marie-Louise von Franz (1915–1998) Swiss psychologist and scholar

Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche (1994), The Anima as the Woman within the Man

God , People , Thinking , Time

“The vast differences in power contributed to faulty social theories of these differences that are still with us today. When a society is economically dominant, it is easy for its members to assume that such dominance reflects a deeper superiority--whether religious, racial, genetic, cultural, or institutional--rather than an accident of timing or geography.”

Jeffrey D. Sachs book The End of Poverty

The End of Poverty" The End of Poverty, 2005

Time

“It was not his to choose from what volume or on which page thereof he would read; accident, as it seemed, decided that; but the chance-opened page lay unblurred before him, and he saw it with a clarity denied to other men of his generation.”

James Branch Cabell book The Cream of the Jest

Source: The Cream of the Jest (1917), Ch. 23 : Economic Considerations of Piety

Men , Chance , Reading

“The second Transformers movie came out this year. I didn't fight for a ticket. I'd caught the first one by accident. It was like being pinned to the ground while an angry dishwasher shat in your face for two hours. Any human dumb enough to voluntarily sit through a second helping of that unremitting fecal spew really ought to just get up and leave the planet via the nearest window before their continued presence does lasting damage to the gene pool.”

Charlie Brooker (1971) journalist, broadcaster and writer from England

The Guardian, 3 August, 2009 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/aug/03/hollywood-ideas-charlie-brooker
Guardian columns

Help , Fight

“Most normal accidents have a significant degree of incomprehensibility.”

Charles Perrow book Normal Accidents

Source: 1980s and later, Normal Accidents, 1984, p. 23

“To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies — the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said — there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

Source: 1910s, A Book of Prefaces (1917), Ch. 2

Way , Search , Joy , Perfection

“Its (the Left’s) intensity derives from the fact that it’s a family largely composed of, in a manner of speaking, orphans of bhadralok history (for we hardly hear of the mothers and fathers of party members), brought together not by accident but by idealism and its cousin, ideology. Bonds of orphanhood and kinship are particularly charged (as Kipling showed us in The Jungle Book) when they are self-created, and each party member is probably a bit of everything – mother, father, sibling, friend – to every other member.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

Calcutta: Two Years in The City (2013)

Books , Family , History , Siblings

“To put it crudely, theorists can be tempted to think along the lines “If people as clever as us haven’t explained it, that’s because it can’t be explained – it’s just an accident.” I believe there are at least two important regularities among standard model parameters that do have deeper explanations, namely the unification of couplings and the smallness of the QCD θ parameter. There may well be others.”

Frank Wilczek (1951) physicist

"Multiversality" (2013)

People , Thinking

“It is probably not an accident that modern science grew explosively in Christian Europe and left the rest of the world behind. A thousand years of theological disputes nurtured the habit of analytical thinking that could also be applied to the analysis of natural phenomena. On the other hand, the close historical relations between theology and science have caused conflicts between science and Christianity that does not exist between science and other religions.”

Freeman Dyson (1923) theoretical physicist and mathematician

The Scientist As Rebel (2006)

World , Religion , Nature , Thinking

“The ascetic, when he wishes to act within the world … must become afflicted with a sort of happy closure of the mind regarding any question about the meaning of the world, for he must not worry about such questions. Hence, it is no accident that inner-worldly asceticism reached its most consistent development on the foundation of the Calvinist god's absolute inexplicability, utter remoteness from every human criterion, and unsearchableness as to his motives. Thus, the inner-worldly ascetic is the recognized "man of a vocation," who neither inquires about nor finds it necessary to inquire about the meaning of his actual practice of a vocation within the whole world, the total framework of which is not his responsibility but his god's.”

Max Weber book Economy and Society

Source: Economy and Society (1922), pp. 547-548

God , World , Motivation , Question

“Fascinated in the sense that it’s advanced human rights; it’s advanced in the sense that everything in your license, everything in your birth certificate can now be determined by the person himself. Nothing to be determined by the accident of birth. That is advanced citizenship, and I am all for it.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

Outrage http://outragemag.com/is-chiz-your-vice-president-for-eleksyon2016/
2016

Birth , Sense , Personality

“The Doomsday Machine is not sufficiently controllable. Even though it maximizes the probability that deterrence will work (including minimizing the probability of accidents or miscalculations), it is totally unsatisfactory. One must still examine the consequences of a failure. In this case a failure kills too many people and kills them too automatically. There is no chance of human intervention, control, and final decision. And even if we give up the computer and make the Doomsday Machine reliably controllable by the decision makers, it is still not controllable enough. Neither NATO nor the United States, and possibly not even the Soviet Union, would be willing to spend billions of dollars to give a few individuals this particular kind of life and death power over the entire world.”

Herman Kahn (1922–1983) American futurist

The Magnum Opus; On Thermonuclear War

Life , Death , People , World

“There's no question young drivers have far more accidents than older ones-but is it our aim to keep them off the roads? Or to allow only rich young people (who can afford the premiums) to drive?”

Andrew Tobias (1947) American journalist

Source: The Invisible Bankers, Everything The Insurance Industry Never Wanted You To Know (1982), Chapter 11, Too Many Underwriters, Too Many Agents, p. 196.

People , Question

“He who remembers the evils he has undergone, and those that have threatened him, and the slight causes that have changed him from one state to another, prepares himself in that way for future changes and for recognizing his condition. The life of Caesar has no more to show us than our own; an emperor's or an ordinary man's, it is still a life subject to all human accidents.”

Michel De Montaigne book Essays

Book III, Ch. 13
Essais (1595), Book III

Life , Way , Evil , Change

“I view the major features of my own odyssey as a set of mostly fortunate contingencies. I was not destined by inherited mentality or family tradition to become a paleontologist. I can locate no tradition for scientific or intellectual careers anywhere on either side of my eastern European Jewish background. […] I view my serious and lifelong commitment to baseball in entirely the same manner: purely as a contingent circumstance of numerous, albeit not entirely capricious, accidents.”

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American evolutionary biologist

"Seventh Inning Stretch: Baseball, Father, and Me", p. 29
Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville (2003)

Family

“All men are our brothers. As far as the discovery of the truth is concerned, they are all working for the same purpose; they may be separated by the accidents of space and time, and by the exigencies of race, religion, nationality, and other groupings; from the point of view of eternity they are working together.”

George Sarton (1884–1956) American historian of science

Preface.
A History of Science Vol.2 Hellenistic Science and Culture in the Last Three Centuries B.C. (1959)

Men , Truth , Religion , Time

“Most people think that these high-density poor neighborhoods, predominately people of color, just came about through some accident of history, but they were the conscious creation”

Cory Booker (1969) 35th Class 2 senator for New Jersey in U.S. Congress

of institutional racism
In [Ray, Elaine, Cory Booker encourages students to use their moral imaginations to work for good, https://news.stanford.edu/thedish/2016/02/24/cory-booker-encourages-students-to-use-their-moral-imaginations-to-work-for-good/, Stanford University, 21 August 2018, February 24, 2016], as quoted in [Ross, Janell, Six noteworthy things about Cory Booker, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/07/25/six-noteworthy-things-about-cory-booker/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.8842f22736b9, 21 August 2018, The Washington Post, July 25, 2016]
2016

People , Color , History , Thinking

“Everybody here drove around like a dedicated loser, expecting moment to moment to get into an accident. Doc could relate to this — it was like the beach, where you lived in a climate of unquestioning hippie belief, pretending to trust everybody while always expecting to be sold out”

Thomas Pynchon book Inherent Vice

but he didn't have to enjoy that either, especially.
Source: Inherent Vice (2009), p. 225

“The masterpiece should appear as the flower to the painter—perfect in its bud as in its bloom - with no reason to explain it's presence - no mission to fulfill - a joy to the artist, a delusion to the philanthropist - a puzzle to the botanist - an accident of sentiment and alliteration to the literary man.”

James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) American-born, British-based artist

Propositions, 2
1870 - 1903, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies' (1890)

Flowers , Appearance , Joy , Perfection

“I don’t really remember writing it [The Day I Tried To Live]. I vaguely remember the verse. It was based on a tuning that Ben Shepherd had came up with. Lyrically, it was one of those songs that I thought everyone could connect with. ‘Fell On Black Days’ is maybe a sister song to it. It’s this feeling that could come over anyone, and has probably happened to everyone. ‘Fell On Black Days’ is the feeling of waking up one day and realizing you’re not happy with your life. Nothing happened, there was no emergency, no accident, you don’t know what happened. You were happy, and one day you just aren’t, and you have to try to figure that out.
With ‘The Day I Tried To Live,’ the attitude I was trying to convey was that thing that I think everyone goes through where you wake up in the morning and you just don’t know how you are going to get through the day, and you kind of just talk yourself into it. You may go through different moments of hopelessness and wanting to give up, or wanting to just get back into bed and say f— it, but you convince yourself you’re going to do it again. And maybe this is the last time you’re going to do it, but it’s once more around.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

Interview with Entertainment Weekly, June 3, 2014 http://ew.com/article/2014/06/03/soundgarden-superunknown-spoonman-black-hole-sun-stories/,
On depression and suicide

Life , Feeling , Thinking , Sister

“It takes just the right combination of circumstances to produce a catastrophe, just as it takes the right combination of inevitable errors to produce an accident.”

Charles Perrow book Normal Accidents

Source: 1980s and later, Normal Accidents, 1984, p. 356

Error

“We are born by accident into a purely random universe.”

Robert Silverberg book The Stochastic Man

Source: The Stochastic Man (1975), Chapter 1, (p. 1; opening words)

Universe

“In advanced age, and in cases of disability from accident, natural infirmity or any other cause, the individual shall be supported by the colony, and receive every comfort which kindness can administer.”

Robert Owen (1771–1858) Welsh social reformer

The Social System (1826)

Age , Support , Nature

“By many a happy accident.”

Thomas Middleton (1580–1627) English playwright and poet

No Wit, no Help, like a Woman's (1611), Act ii. Sc. 2. Compare: "A happy accident", Madame de Staël, L'Allemagne, chap. xvi. Cervantes, Don Quixote, book iv. part ii. chap. lvii.

Happiness

“In its evolution from a more primitive nervous system, the brain, as an organ with ten or more billion neurons and many more connections between them must have changed and grown as a result of many accidents.”

Stanislaw Ulam (1909–1984) Polish-American mathematician

Source: Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991), Chapter 15, Random Reflections on Mathematics and Science, p. 274

Change

“A series of accidents creates a positively lighthearted state.”

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French sociologist and philosopher

Source: 1980s, Cool Memories (1987, trans. 1990), Chapter 4

Light , Heart

“To build a theory of international relations on accidents of geography and history is dangerous.”

Kenneth N. Waltz book Man, the State, and War

Source: Man, the State, and War (1959), Chapter IV, The Second Image, p. 107

History

“Human opinions are formed by accident and hardened by repetition. We cling to acquired opinions only because they give the illusion of being wise opinions. This creates division and hostility between people.”

Vernon Howard (1918–1992) American writer

Pathways to Perfect Living

Hostility , People

“Think of the federal government as a gigantic insurance company (with a sideline business in national defense and homeland security), which does its accounting on a cash basis, only counting premiums and payouts as they go in and out the door. An insurance company with cash accounting... is an accident waiting to happen.”

Peter R. Fisher (1956) American treasury official

While under secretary of the U.S. Treasury in 2002; frequently short-handed as "an insurance company with an army." A Fiscal Train Wreck, Paul, Krugman, Paul Krugman, March 11, 2003, The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/11/opinion/a-fiscal-train-wreck.html,
How government is like insurance, June 28, 2011, Thomas F., Schaller, Baltimore Sun http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2011-06-28/news/bs-ed-schaller-20110628_1_unemployment-insurance-premiums-government-insurance,
Who First Said the US is 'An Insurance Company with an Army'?, Economist's View, Mark, Thoma, January 17, 2013 http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2013/01/who-first-said-the-us-is-an-insurance-company-with-an-army.html,

Business , Thinking , Waiting

“Burns is "an accident that happens again and again and again."”

Conrad Burns (1935–2016) United States Marine

Bob Herbert http://www.citizensforethics.org/press/pressclip.php?view=1932
About

“When replacement or repair is required due either to accident or deterioration by age, the materials are readily at hand, and the householder himself can do the work.”

Ken Kern American writer

The Owner Built Home: A How-to-do-it Book (1972)

Age

“I had teeth that stuck out so far, I used to eat other kids' candy bars by accident.”

Rita Rudner (1953) American comedian

Essay 42: "Fillings Nothing … More Than Fillings", p. 151
Naked Beneath My Clothes (1992)

“They die and leave their wives their money. I should know, shouldn't I? Sometimes they're driving home from their mistress's apartment and their brakes suddenly fail. An accident, Delores, can be an unhappy woman's best friend.”

Stephen King book Dolores Claiborne

Dolores Claiborne (1992)

Money , Home

“My life seemed to be a series of events and accidents. Yet when I look back I see a pattern.”

Benoît Mandelbrot (1924–2010) Polish-born, French and American mathematician

New Scientist interview (2004)

Life

“It is no accident that the Labour Party of 1964 should share this craving for autarchy, for economic self-sufficiency, with the pre-war Fascist régimes and the present-day Communist states. They are all at heart totalitarian.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech to the Dulwich Conservative Association (29 February 1964), from A Nation Not Afraid. The Thinking of Enoch Powell (B. T. Batsford Ltd, 1965), p. 75
1960s

War , Heart

“If someone claims the incident was pre-planned, I completely refute this. What happened was an accident. It is unfortunate.”

Mahesh Sharma (1959) Indian politician

On the 2015 Dadri mob lynching, as quoted in " Dadri lynching: Mob murder an accident, arrested youths too will get justice, says Mahesh Sharma http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/dadri-lynching-union-minister-mahesh-sharma-meets-victim-family-insists-it-was-accident/" The Indian Express (3 October 2015)

“Pluralist societies are not accidents of history. They are a product of enlightened education and continuous investment by governments and all of civil society in recognizing and celebrating the diversity of the world’s peoples.”

Aga Khan IV (1936) 49th and current Imam of Nizari Ismailism

In a speech on Democratic Development, Pluralism and Civil Society delivered at the Nobel Institute, Oslo, Norway (7 April 2005). http://www.akdn.org/speech/nobel-institute-oslo

People , World , Education , History

“Full-blooded democracy still remains a brave new experiment, the history of ancient Athens notwithstanding. It would be unwise to assume that its victory across the globe is inevitable, for democracy is not always a simple mode of governing. It is almost forgotten that one reason why in this century the world stood three times on the verge of chaos - during two world wars and one world depression - was that the leading democracies were almost as prone to accidents and blunders as were their authoritarian rivals.”

Geoffrey Blainey (1930) Australian historian

In Our Time: The Issues and The People of Our Century (1999)

War , World , Democracy , History

“I find that I have great faith in human nature. I believe that people are good. I believe they are to be trusted. So far as I know, no one has ever betrayed my faith, in any way. If they ever have, I've been spared the knowledge of it.
If I couldn't have faith in human nature, I wouldn't want to live. It is the one thing that could destroy for me the joy of living.
I've come to believe that life, under almost any conditions, is worth while.
I found that out when I had my accident some years ago, and was in the hospital.
I thought, for a couple of weeks, that I would be blind for life. I thought I would surely be so disabled that I would never be able to work again. I didn't suppose that I would have one five-hundredth of what I have now. Still I thought, 'Life is worth while. Just to be alive. I still think so.”

Harold Lloyd (1893–1971) American film actor and producer

"Discoveries About Myself". Motion Picture, October 1930, pg. 90. (Brewster Publications). https://archive.org/stream/motionpicture1923040chic#page/n595/mode/2up

Life , People , Faith , Way

“By contrast with diamonds or asbestos or granite or the minerals we burn for fuel, the lowly agate is the victim of scientific disinterest, the same kinds of structured apathy I have elsewhere called 'the social construction of ignorance.' Agates seem to fall outside the orbit of geological knowledge, and therefore tend to be regarded — if at all — as geological accidents or oddities not really deserving systematic study.”

Robert N. Proctor (1954) American historian

Robert N. Proctor, Agate Eyes: A Lapidary Journey (book-in-progress), cited in: Nancy Marie Brown, " The Agateer: How do agates form? http://news.psu.edu/story/140641/2001/09/01/research/agateer," Penn State News, September 1, 2001

Knowledge , Study

“The dead? But the dead have no rights. They are nothing; and nothing cannot own something. Where there is no substance, there can be no accident. This corporeal globe, and everything upon it, belong to its present corporeal inhabitants, during their generation. They alone have a right to direct what is the concern of themselves alone, and to declare the law of that direction; and this declaration can only be made by their majority. That majority, then, has a right to depute representatives to a convention, and to make the constitution what they think will be the best for themselves.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

1810s, Letter to H. Tompkinson (AKA Samuel Kercheval) (1816)

Law , Thinking , Dead

“The intellectual origins of literary theory in Europe were, I think it is accurate to say, insurrectionary. The traditional university, the hegemony of determinism and positivism, the reification of ideological bourgeois “humanism,” the rigid barriers between academic specialties: it was powerful responses to all these that linked together such influential progenitors of today’s literary theorist as Saussure, Lukács, Bataille, Lévi-Strauss, Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx. Theory proposed itself as a synthesis overriding the petty fiefdoms within the world of intellectual production, and it was manifestly to be hoped as a result that all the domains of human activity could be seen, and lived, as a unity. … Literary theory, whether of the Left or the Right, has turned its back on these things. This can be considered, I think, the triumph of the ethic of professionalism. But it is no accident that the emergence of so narrowly defined a philosophy of pure textuality and critical noninterference has coincided with the ascendancy of Reaganism.”

Edward Said (1935–2003) Professor of English and literature

The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), pp. 3-4

World , Hope , Thinking , Universe

“We still encounter considerable doses of messiness, accident, fortuitous coupling, and dumb luck.”

John W. Kingdon (1940) American political scientist

Source: Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies - (Second Edition), Chapter 9, Wrapping Things Up, p. 206

“The thing I love about acting is, whatever character you play, it gives you the chance to expose another side of yourself that maybe you’ve never felt comfortable with, or never knew about. Not that every character is you, but there are underlying emotions that everybody has. I feel that movies are gifts that come to you, and there are no accidents in what you end up doing. I study Jung, who talks a lot about the shadow side, the repressed side.”

Laura Dern (1967) American actress, director, producer

Regarding the correlation between acting and one's personality
Interview Magazines interview (September 1990)

Love , Feeling , Study , Chance

“However, there are all sorts of behaviours in the Bible that might be called mad now, but aren't designated as insanity by the text itself. People see visions — of angels going up and down ladders, of fiery chariots — and, like Moses, who hears a bush talking, and Balaam the prophet who has a conversation with his donkey, they hear voices of those who cannot be said to be present in any usual sense of the word. They also speak in tongues, as the disciples do at Pentecost. Like madness, the visions, the voices and the speaking in tongues are due to external and usually divine agencies. In a world so permeated with supernatural powers, there are no accidents, and in one so riddled with prophets — who went into a frenzy while prophesying — many more kinds of behaviour were accepted as normal, at least for a prophet or an inspired person, than would be the case now. John the Baptist, dressed in animal skins and wandering around in the wilderness denouncing his social superiors, was not thought of as a de-institutionalized street person who's gone off his medications, but as a saint. And this was the pattern for mediaeval views of aberrant behaviour — if you were acting crazy it was a divine punishment, or else you were possessed, by powers either divine or demonic — perhaps aided, in the latter case, by witches.”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

Ophelia Has a Lot to Answer For (1997)

People , World , Angels , Sense

“That's the way beauty is found, by accident [referring to the Glass house he lived in, with the family]. You don't recognize it when you are looking for it, and you won't find it by looking in a magazine. It's right here in the moon, the stars, the horizon, the snow formations... In this house we can see all those things. But what I miss are the songs in the fields. No one sings them any more because everyone has become a little businessman. And there are no more plows. I love a plow more than anything else on a farm.”

Arshile Gorky (1904–1948) Armenian-American painter

1942 - 1948, A Painter in a Glass House' (1948)

Love , Family , Beauty , Way

“In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens you can bet it was planned that way.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) 32nd President of the United States

There are no records of Roosevelt having made such a statement, and this is most likely a misquotation of the widely reported comment he made in a speech at the Citadel (23 October 1935):
: Yes, we are on our way back — not just by pure chance, my friends, not just by a turn of the wheel, of the cycle. We are coming back more soundly than ever before because we are planning it that way. Don't let anybody tell you differently.
Misattributed

Way

“Change should be a friend. It should happen by plan, not by accident.”

Philip B. Crosby (1926–2001) Quality guru

Philip B. Crosby (1995), Reflections on Quality.

Change

“As an organizational sociologist, I was interested in the system characteristics of large accidents, but the discipline also made me aware of the organizational genesis of male-made disasters.”

Charles Perrow book Normal Accidents

Source: 1980s and later, Normal Accidents, 1984, p. 4

“It was no accident that I found my way to Götz at the time [c. 1960-62]. This 'Informal' element runs through every picture I've painted, whether it's a landscape, or a family painted from a photograph, or the Colour Charts or a Grey picture. And so now it is a pursuit of the same objectives by other means... As I now see it, all my paintings are 'Informal'.... except for the landscapes, perhaps... The 'Informal' is the opposite of the constructional quality of classicism – the age of kings, of clearly formed hierarchies.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 42, note 45 : quote on his period of Informal art

Age , Family , Way , Time

“The nuclear power industry, for example, lacks a strong union, has random public victims with delayed effects, has no safety board that is independent of licensing and regulatory functions, and does not see an immediate effect on its profits if safety flags (though a far more severe incentive exists to avoid a catastrophic accident which could shut down the industry)”

Charles Perrow book Normal Accidents

Source: 1980s and later, Normal Accidents, 1984, p. 127

Strong

“Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.”

William Torrey Harris (1835–1909) American philosopher

Source: The Philosophy of Education (His 1889 book)

Education

“I just fell into the acting thing as kind of an accident.”

Mark Wahlberg (1971) American actor, television producer and rap musician

Chris Heath, The making of Mark, The Observer, Sunday 27 February 2000 http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2000/feb/27/1

“The random quantum fluctuations of my brain are historical accidents that happen to have decided that the concepts of dynamic scoping and lexical scoping are orthogonal and should remain that way.”

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

[199709021854.LAA12794@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

Way

“But then, our way is the natural way ordained by god herself, whereas I have no idea whose set of social accidents and economic anomalies have contoured the ways of your odd and awkward land.”

Samuel R. Delany book Tales of Nevèrÿon

Section 2 (p. 177)
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)

God , Way , Idea , Nature

“… Her aunt is an agnostic, an ardent advocate of women's rights, an internationalist who rests all her hopes on Esperanto, is devoted to Bernard Shaw, and spends her spare time in campaigns of anti-vivisection. Her elder brother, whom she admires exceedingly, has just spent two years at Oxford. He is an Anglo-Catholic, an enthusiast concerning all things medieval, writes mystical poetry, reads Chesterton, and means to devote his life to seeking for the lost secret of medieval stained glass. Her mother's younger brother is an engineer, a strict materialist, who never recovered from reading Haeckel in his youth; he scorns art, believes that science will save the world, scoffs at everything that was said and thought before the nineteenth century, and ruins his health by experiments in the scientific elimination of sleep. Her mother is of a quietistic frame of mind, very much interested in Indian philosophy, a pacifist, a strict non-participator in life, who in spite of her daughter's devotion to her will not make any move to enlist her enthusiasms. And this may be within the girl's own household. Add to it the groups represented, defended, advocated by her friends, her teachers, and the books which she reads by accident, and the list of possible enthusiasms, of suggested allegiances, incompatible with one another, becomes appalling.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1920s, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), p. 161

Life , Women , Health , Secret

“Irony deals with opposites; it has nothing to do with coincidence. If two baseball players from the same hometown, on different teams, receive the same uniform number, it is not ironic. It is a coincidence. If Barry Bonds attains lifetime statistics identical to his father's, it will not be ironic. It will be a coincidence. Irony is "a state of affairs that is the reverse of what was to be expected; a result opposite to and in mockery of the appropriate result." For instance: a diabetic, on his way to buy insulin, is killed by a runaway truck. He is the victim of an accident. If the truck was delivering sugar, he is the victim of an oddly poetic coincidence. But if the truck was delivering insulin, ah! Then he is the victim of an irony. If a Kurd, after surviving bloody battle with Saddam Hussein's army and a long, difficult escape through the mountains, is crushed and killed by a parachute drop of humanitarian aid, that, my friend, is irony writ large. Darryl Stingley, the pro football player, was paralyzed after a brutal hit by Jack Tatum. Now Darryl Stingley's son plays football, and if the son should become paralyzed while playing, it will not be ironic. It will be coincidental. If Darryl Stingley's son paralyzes someone else, that will be closer to ironic. If he paralyzes Jack Tatum's son, that will be precisely ironic.”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

Books, Brain Droppings (1997)

Way , Mountain , Football

“Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.”

G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English mystery novelist and Christian apologist

A Miscellany of Men (1912)

Money , Secret

“The heroic virtues of some great men have been the cause of the corruption of eloquence, or have, at least, enervated the style of most preachers. Instead of joining with the people in rendering thanks to Heaven for the extraordinary gifts it has bestowed on those great men, these very preachers have enrolled themselves among authors and poets, and become panegyrists; they have even uttered more extravagant praises than are found in dedications, verses, or prologues; they have turned the Word of God into a whole warp of praises, which, though well deserved, are out of place, bestowed from selfish motives, not required, and ill-suited to their calling. It is fortunate indeed, if, while they are celebrating their heroes in the sanctuary, they even mention the name of that God or of that religion they ought to preach. Some have wished to preach the Gospel, which is for all men, only to one person, and have been so disconcerted when by accident that person was kept away, that they were unable to pronounce a Christian discourse before an assembly of Christian men, because it was not prepared for them, so that other orators have been obliged to take their places, who had only sufficient leisure to praise God in an extemporary exhortation.!”

Jean de La Bruyère book Les Caractères

Of the Pulpit (13)
Les Caractères (1688)

Men , God , People , Religion

“Boss: You forgot to assign the result of your map!Hacker: Dang, I'm always forgetting my assignations…Boss: And what's that 'goto' doing there?!?Hacker: Er, I guess my finger slipped when I was typing 'getservbyport'…Boss: Ah well, accidents will happen. Maybe we should have picked APL.”

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

[199710311732.JAA19169@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

Forgetting

“Most accidents in well-designed systems involve two or more events of low probability occurring in the worst possible combination.”

Robert E. Machol (1917–1998) American systems engineer

Cited in: Richard K. Betts (1982) Surprise attack: lessons for defense planning. p. 158
Principles of Operations Research (1975)

“On the whole, the scientist is better off if he collects his facts by accident, little by little, so he can study them before he tries to fit them into a jigsaw puzzle, This is how the late Tom Lethbridge came to arrive at his theories about other dimensions of reality. It is also how Guy Lyon Playfair came to develop his own theories about the nature of the poltergeist.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Poltergeist!: A Study In Destructive Haunting (1982), p. 196

Guy , Nature , Reality , Study

“Money is neither god nor devil, that it should make one noble and another vile. It is an accident, and if honestly possessed, may pass from you to me, or from me to you, without a stain.”

Anthony Trollope book Phineas Finn

Ch. 72 http://books.google.com/books?id=Jy1MAAAAcAAJ&q=%22Money+is+neither+god+nor+devil+that+it+should+make+one+noble+and+another+vile+It+is+an+accident+and+if+honestly+possessed+may+pass+from+you+to+me+or+from+me+to+you+without+stain%22&pg=PA269#v=onepage, St. Paul's Magazine, April 1869 http://books.google.com/books?id=wkBJAAAAMAAJ&q=%22Money+is+neither+god+nor+devil+that+it+should+make+one+noble+and+another+vile+It+is+an+accident+and+if+honestly+possessed+may+pass+from+you+to+me+or+from+me+to+you+without+stain%22&pg=PA126#v=onepage
Phineas Finn (1869)

Money , God