Quotes about probability

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“Probably I dont believe in a lot of things that I used to believe in but that doesnt mean I dont believe in anything.”

“Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal. Only styles change.”

“Even if we could turn back, we'd probably never end up where we started.”

“You don't go on "probably" when love and guns are in hand.”

“The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can't make something out of a little experience, you probably won't be able to make it out of a lot.”

“Which of my feelings are real? Which of the me's is me? The wild, impulsive, chaotic, energetic, and crazy one? Or the shy, withdrawn, desperate, suicidal, doomed, and tired one? Probably a bit of both, hopefully much that is neither.”

“Awesome. I'd terrified the Legatus of the Golden Legion just by showing him my sword. If I waved it around, he'd probably explode.”

“The probability of separate worlds meeting is very small. The lure of it is immense. We send starships. We fall in love.”

“Bigots see something they expect and then they stop thinking about what is in front of them. It's probably how they got to be bigots in the first place.”

“These are hard times. The world hurts. We live in fear and forget to walk with hope. But hope has not forgotten you. So ask it to dinner. It's probably hungry and would appreciate the invitation.”

“I've never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It's probably because they have forgotten their own.”

“How are you?"
"Perfectly fine," he said.
"Are your ribs broken?"
"Probably not. Cracked at most. We fought very carefully."
"Did this settle anything?"
"It made me feel better," he said, sitting up. "Did you see me kick him in the kidneys?"
"I saw.”

“Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French. One of the things which Gertrude Butterwick had impressed on Monty Bodkin when he left for his holiday on the Riviera was that he must be sure to practise his French, and Gertrude’s word was law. So now, though he knew that it was going to make his nose tickle, he said:
‘Er, garçon.’
‘M’sieur?’
‘Er, garçon, esker-vous avez un spot de l’encre et une piece de papier—note papier, vous savez—et une envelope et une plume.’
The strain was too great. Monty relapsed into his native tongue.
‘I want to write a letter,’ he said. And having, like all lovers, rather a tendency to share his romance with the world, he would probably have added ‘to the sweetest girl on earth’, had not the waiter already bounded off like a retriever, to return a few moments later with the fixings.
‘V’la, sir! Zere you are, sir,’ said the waiter. He was engaged to a girl in Paris who had told him that when on the Riviera he must be sure to practise his English. ‘Eenk—pin—pipper—enveloppe—and a liddle bit of bloddin-pipper.’
‘Oh, merci,’ said Monty, well pleased at this efficiency. ‘Thanks. Right-ho.’
‘Right-ho, m’sieur,’ said the waiter.”

“If everyone in the world sat quietly at the same time, closed their eyes and concentrated as hard as they could on peace and goodwill, all the killing and cruelty in the world would continue. And probably increase.”

“Hope is the confusion of the desire for a thing with its probability.”

“The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man”

“And as you walk yr road, as you live yr life, RELISH THE ROAD. And relish the fact that the road of yr life will probably be a windy road.”

“Sure baby, mañana. It was always mañana. For the next few weeks that was all I heard––mañana a lovely word and one that probably means heaven.”

“If you don't want to be in an argument with someone, it is probably best to try to solve the problem, rather than lying around hoping the other person will do it for you.”

“Statistically the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you would think the mere fact of existence would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise.”

“An idyllic childhood is probably illusion.”

“One thing I've learned in all these years is not to make love when you really don't feel it; there's probably nothing worse you can do to yourself than that.”

“Maybe I should have cut him some slack. With his broken wing and lifetime of eating roadkill, he probably had a lot to be ungrateful about. Too much hard luck can create a permanent meanness of spirit in any creature.”

“She is probably by this time as tired of me, as I am of her; but as she is too Polite and I am too civil to say so, our letters are still as frequent and affectionate as ever, and our Attachment as firm and sincere as when it first commenced.”

“Sister is probably the most competitive relationship within the family, but once the sisters are grown, it becomes the strongest relationship.”

“I think they’ll probably put that on my gravestone. ‘He Was Heterosexual and Had Low Expectations.”

“I love you Clary. More then I ever-- God. More than i probably should. You know that, don't you?”

“As the poet said, "Only God can make a tree"— probably because it's so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.”

“It just makes me wonder what subject you blame for talking to me every night.'
I'm still settling on an answer for that one. Probably Chemistry.
Jesus Christ. I can't believe I just wrote that.”

“Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another--physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion.”

“I'm sure Uncle Eddie won't kill him. He'll probably just maim him a little."

"No," Uncle Eddie said. "I won't."

"Okay," Gabrielle said. "So he'll maim him. But Hale can take it.”

“Good. Show me a man who thinks that he knows what 'good' is, and I will probably be able to show you a horror of a person. Show me a person who really knows what 'good' is, and I will show you that he almost never uses the word.”

“This was just one night, one chance to vary and see where it took me. The fireflies were probably already out: maybe it wasn’t just a season or a time but a whole world I’d forgotten. I’d never know until I stepped out into it. So I did.”

“He'd probably been born with abs. Some were born with abs, some achieved abs, and some - like Simon - had abs thrust upon them by cruel instructors.”

“I think I'd probably tell you that it's easier to desire and pursue the attention of tens of millions of total strangers than it is to accept the love and loyalty of the people closest to us.”

“This college would probably have the same problem as the last one did."
I frowned, "What's that?"
"Homework.”

“Embrace the probability of your imminent death…. and know there is nothing i can do to save you.”

“Advice! Nobody tells us how to be men. We just are." "That is probably why you make such a bad job of it.- Perrin and Egwene”

“Anyway that other thing we almost did in Paris-that's probably off the table for a while. Unless you want that whole baby-I'm-on-fire-when-we kiss thing to become freakishly literal”

“The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle.”

“Was it the happiest day of our lives? Probably not, if only because the truly happy days tend not to involve so much organisation, are rarely so public or so expensive. The happy ones sneak up, unexpected.”

“I wanted to cry but I didn't, I probably should have cried, I should have drowned us there in the room ending our suffering.”

“Zeus did not answer. He was probably too busy recording my humiliation to share on Snapchat.”

“If contemporary literary fiction doesn't read a bit like science fiction then it's probably not all that contemporary, is it”

“The Herondales are a rather infamous line, as you probably know. Many of them heroes, some of them traitors, so many of them brash, wild creatures consumed by their passions, whether it be love or hate.”

“I've never been shot, but this probably what it feels like, that second of nothingness right before the pain catches up to the bullet.”

“If life gives you lemons lets be honest you probably just found lemons”

“We probably looked like starving orphan children. Hey! We were starving orphan children.”

“Do you know what it's like to like someone so much you can't stand it and know that they'll never feel the same way? Probably not. People like you don't have to suffer through those kind of things.”

“The woman frowned. "I probably should have mentioned that annoying habit of letting people come to the wrong conclusions and not correcting them? He got it from me.”

“When I was a child, it was a matter of pride that I could plow through a Nancy Drew story in one afternoon, and begin another in the evening…. I was probably trying to impress the librarians who kept me supplied with books.”

“My "fear" is my substance, and probably the best part of me.”

“Just for you non-sea-god types out there, don't go swimming in New York Harbor. It may not be as filthy as it was in my mom's day, but that water will still probably make you grow a third eye or have mutant children when you grow up.”

“Very possible! Possible, indeed. Maybe even probable, which, as you know if you study your arithmetic, can happen more often than possible. In other words, probable is more possible than possible. - Bubo”

“I know that even now, having watched enough television, you probably won't even refer to them as lepers so as to spare their feelings. You probably call them 'parts-dropping-off challenged' or something.”

“Calvin: As far as I'm concerned, if something is so complicated that you can't explain it in 10 seconds, then it's probably not worth knowing anyway.
p25”

“Really?"
"No. I'm being ironic. Or is it sarcastic? I can never remember."
"Irony's cleverer, so you're probably being sarcastic.”

“A lie, as you probably know, has a taste all its own. Blocky and bitter and never quite right, like when you pop a piece of fancy chocolate into your mouth expecting toffee filling and you get lemon zest instead.”

“If only Simon were here. He could probably bore you to sleep.”

“I'm not sure you're quite sensible of the honor I'm doing you," Jace said. "you'll be the first mundane who has ever been inside the Institute.""Probably the smell keeps the rest of them away.”

“I would never see her again, except in memory. She was here, and now she's gone. There is no middle ground. Probably is a word that you may find south of the border. But never, ever west of the sun.”

“They'd poisoned me, dammit. Probably to trade my dead body to the barbarians for Wulfgar's safe return. Or maybe just for the fun of it.”

“If I looked in the mirror someday and saw no dark circles under my eyes, I would probably look better. I just wouldn't look like me.”

“You're probably the most boring teenager in the world.”

“The obvious," Noah goes on, a little out of breath, "being that he is probably some super secret assassin or something. And I'm not as tough as I look."
"That's OK," I tell him. "I'm way tougher than you look.”

“He could do this. He'd survived boot camp. He'd survived combat and the harsh weather of Afghanistan. He could survive broccoli. Probably.”

“if I am not actively creating something, then I am probably actively destroying something”

“Charles preferred his deer to taste like meat and his pancakes to look like pancakes. Brother Wolf thought he was too picky. Brother Wolf was probably right.”

“For all that "I was lost, I am found," it is probably more accurate to say, "I was really lost, I'm a little less so at the moment.”

“If it looks like a Dwarf, and it smells like a Dwarf, then it's probably a Dwarf or a latrine wearing dungerees.”

“Men don’t realize that if we’re sleeping with them on the first date, we’re probably not interested in seeing them again either.”

“If he'd looked like a cross between Mr. Clooney and, say, one of the hobbits, I probably would have been far more capable of coherent thought.”

“Probably."
"Again with the probablys."
"A world full of probablys," she said.”

“I think my reputation is something that I'll probably try to spend the rest of my life living it down and it probably won't work.”

“Because Wikipedia is a process, not a product, it replaces guarantees offered by institutions with probabilities supported by process: if enough people care enough about an article to read it, then enough people will care enough to improve it, and over time this will lead to a large enough body of good enough work to begin to take both availability and quality of articles for granted, and to integrate Wikipedia into daily use by millions.”

“The necessity for fiction was probably born of the problem of taboo on certain revelations. It was not only a need of the imagination but an answer to the limitations placed on portrayal of others.”

“The union of these four Presidents carved on the face of the everlasting hills of South Dakota will constitute a distinctly national monument. It will be decidedly American in conception, in its magnitude, in its meaning and altogether worthy of our Country. No one can look upon it understandingly without realizing that it is a picture of hope fulfilled. Its location will be significant. Here in the heart of the continent, on the side of a mountain which probably no white man had ever beheld in the days of Washington, in territory which was acquired by the action of Jefferson, which remained an unbroken wilderness beyond the days of Lincoln, which was especially beloved by Roosevelt, the people of the future will see history and art combined to portray the spirit of patriotism. They will know that the figure of these Presidents has been placed here because by following the truth they built for eternity. The fundamental principles which they represented have been wrought into the very being of our Country. They are steadfast as these ancient hills.”

“Have I ever remarked on how completely ridiculous it is to ask high school students to decide what they want to do with the rest of their lives and give them nearly no support in doing so? Support like, say, spending a day apiece watching twenty different jobs and then another week at their top three choices, with salary charts and projections and probabilities of graduating that subject given their test scores? The more so considering this is a central allocation question for the entire economy?”

“I think there was a layer of several inches of crystal clear ice, probably in the form of metallic hydrogen, about 10-20 miles up. It could have been held up by the earth’s magnetic field or the internal air pressure like a giant inflatable building or even helped by the centrifugal force of the spinning earth. It could also have had its own spin to help suspend it. Maybe a combination of effects.”

“Provided they are substantiated by hard evidence, not hunches, generalizations are not incorrect. Science relies on the ability to generalize to the larger population observations drawn from a representative sample. People make prudent decisions in their daily lives based on probabilities and generalities. That one chooses not to live in a particular crime-riddled county or country in no way implies that one considers all individual residents there to be criminals, only that a sensible determination has been made, based on statistically significant data, as to where scarce and precious resources—one's life and property—are best invested.”

“Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.”

“When we are customarily annoyed by what we see as the failings of others, we are judging them by a ludicrous standard: we are assuming that they fully understand our desires, quite possibly better than we do, and that they have nothing to do but arrange things to fall seamlessly into place around our probably ill-communicated wishes.”

“From the Christian point of view it stands firm that the truly Christian venturing requires probability. p. 101”

“And just so — if I could, because he insulted a lot of people. I've had more calls on that statement that Ted made — New York is a great place. It's got great people, it's got loving people, wonderful people. When the World Trade Center came down, I saw something that no place on Earth could have handled more beautifully, more humanely than New York. You had two one hundred, you had two 110-story buildings come crashing down. I saw them come down. Thousands of people killed, and the cleanup started the next day, and it was the most horrific cleanup, probably in the history of doing this, and in construction. I was down there, and I've never seen anything like it. And the people in New York fought and fought and fought, and we saw more death, and even the smell of death — nobody understood it. And it was with us for months, the smell, the air. And we rebuilt downtown Manhattan, and everybody in the world watched and everybody in the world loved New York and loved New Yorkers. And I have to tell you, that was a very insulting statement that Ted made.”

“Like Christianity, Buddhism explained suffering. In forms that established themselves in China, Buddhism offered the same sort of comfort to bereaved survivors and victims of violence or of disease as Christian faith did in the Roman world. Buddhism of course originated in India, where disease incidence was probably always very high as compared with civilizations based in cooler climates; Christianity, too, took shape in the urban environments of Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria where the incidence of infectious disease was certainly very high as compared to conditions in cooler and less crowded places. From their inception, therefore, both faiths had to deal with sudden death by disease as one of the conspicuous facts of human life. Consequently, it is not altogether surprising that both religions taught that death was a release from pain, and a blessed avenue of entry upon a delightful afterlife where loved ones would be reunited, and earthly injustices and pains amply compensated for.”

“The craftsmanship that Hollywood has always used as a selling point not only doesn’t have much to do with art — the expressive use of techniques — it probably doesn’t have very much to do with actual box-office appeal, either.”

“We have long observed that every neurosis has the result, and therefore probably the purpose, of forcing the patient out of real life, of alienating him from actuality.”

“ALL PRECEDENTS ARE UNDER THE CONTROUL OF THE PRINCIPLES OF THE LAW … No Acts of Parliament can establish such a writ [writ of assistance enabling British search of homes for no reason]: … it would be void, "AN ACT AGAINST THE CONSTITUTION IS VOID." Vid. Viner. But … special writs may be granted on oath and probable suspicion.”

“By induction we gain no certain knowledge; but by observation, and the inverse use of deductive reasoning, we estimate the probability that an event which has occurred was preceded by conditions of specified character, or that such conditions will be followed by the event. …I have no objection to use the words cause and causation, provided they are never allowed to lead us to imagine that our knowledge of nature can attain to certainty. …We can never recur too often to the truth that our knowledge of the laws and future events of the external world are only probable.”

“From infinite probable acts, comma, only one can be physically experienced as a rule, period. The dream world operates as a creative situation in which probable acts are instantly materialized, laid out in actual or symbolic form. From these you then choose the most appropriate for physical expression.”

“"Everyone is bisexual’: “I’ve always had as many powerful, creative ladies in my life as I have men, and you could probably describe some of those relationships as romantic. I think everyone’s bisexual to some degree or another; it’s just a question of whether or not you choose to recognise it and embrace it. Personally, I think choosing between men and women is like choosing between cake and ice cream. You’d be daft not to try both when there are so many different flavours.””

“In other words, when I say "what's the evidence for that?", it's not that I don't trust your rationality (although of course I don't trust your rationality either), but I just can't deduce what evidence you must have observed from your probability declaration alone even if you were fully rational.”

“Turning finally to the question raised, to be precise, it appears that [Hillary] Clinton received a slight majority of the vote. The apparent decisive victory [of Donald Trump] has to do with curious features of American politics: among other factors, the Electoral College residue of the founding of the country as an alliance of separate states; the winner-take-all system in each state; the arrangement of congressional districts (sometimes by gerrymandering) to provide greater weight to rural votes (in past elections, and probably this one too, Democrats have had a comfortable margin of victory in the popular vote for the House, but hold a minority of seats); the very high rate of abstention (usually close to half in presidential elections, this one included). Of some significance for the future is the fact that in the age 18-25 range, Clinton won handily, and Sanders had an even higher level of support. How much this matters depends on what kind of future humanity will face.”

“I have talked to you in the past but we have always exchanged pleasantries. And it has always been assumed that I am Kaltenbrunner, the big bad man next to Himmler and the successor of Himmler. But I think you can see by this time, after having treated my brain hemorrhages, both in the hospital and here in my cell, that I am not the disagreeable, uncouth fellow the public probably thinks because of all the atrocities committed under Himmler's rule, and of which I am totally innocent.”

“In manufactures, a very small advantage will enable foreigners to undersell our own workmen, even in the home market. It will require a very great one to enable them to do so in the rude produce of the soil. If the free importation of foreign manufactures were permitted, several of the home manufactures would probably suffer, and some of them, perhaps, go to ruin altogether, and a considerable part of the stock and industry at present employed in them, would be forced to find out some other employment. But the freest importation of the rude produce of the soil could have no such effect upon the agriculture of the country.”

“The art of marketing is largely the art of brand building. When something is not a brand, it will be probably be viewed as a commodity.”

“Now it was Liddle, jerking into motion as Wertz poised at the plate, and then the motion smoothed out and the ball came sweeping in to Wertz, a shoulder-high pitch, a fast ball that probably would have been a fast curve, except that Wertz was coming around and hitting it, hitting it about as hard as I have ever seen ball hit, on a high line to dead center field. For whatever it is worth, I have seen such hitters as Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Ted Williams, Jimmy Foxx, Ralph Kiner, Hack Wilson, Johnny Mize, and lesser-known but equally long hitters as Wally Berger and Bob Seeds send the batted ball tremendous distances. None, that I recall, ever hit a ball any harder than this one by Wertz in my presence.”

“Demanding that wolf populations be allowed to continue to increase is not only a false conservation goal, but also a counterproductive tactic that is bound for short-term failure. It is strategically preferable to promote wolf range expansion and to accept reduction of unacceptable levels of conflict through scientifically planned and managed culling rather than through uncontrolled poaching. Full protection of wolf populations living near, or interspersed with, human settlements leads sooner or later to surplus wolves being killed, legally or illegally. Opposing wolf killing altogether implies accepting that all wolves will eventually be removed from these areas, whereas accepting some wolf control will allow wolves over much larger ranges. This vision requires a fundamental shift in the way wolves are perceived by folks who consider every wolf a symbol of the conservation battle or an animal with special rights among all other species. In the end, this approach probably will yield many more wolves than we could afford to keep in a few fully protected areas, no matter how large.”

“I do hereby and forever abandon abandoning all hope. Honestly, I give up on giving up. I'm just not cut out to be some hopeless, disillusioned wretch with no aspirations for the rest of the eternity, sprawled catatonic in my own feces on a cold stone floor. In all probability the Human Genome Project will, someday, find that I carry some recessive gene for optimism, because despite all my best efforts I still can't scrape together even a couple of days of hopelessness. Future scientists would call it Pollyanna Syndrome, and if forced to guess, I'd say that mine has been a way-long case of history chasing rainbows.”