Determinism Quotes - Probabilities Quotes - Gambling Quotes - Man, Life, Speculation

At one moment I may declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, but if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will change my mind about the disaster that I intended to bring upon it. And at another moment I may declare concerning a nation or a kingdom that I will build and plant it, but if it does evil in my sight, not listening to my voice, then I will change my mind about the good that I had intended to do for it. Jeremiah 18:7-10 (God can change His mind)

Iacta alea est - The die is cast
Julius Caesar

A man can surely do what he wills to do, but cannot determine what he wills.
Schopenhauer

No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth.
Richard Dawkins

Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.
Albert Einstein

We like to forget that in fact everything in our life is chance, from our genesis out of the encounter of spermatozoon and egg onward.
Sigmund Freud

I am a determinist. ...The real issue, so far as the will is concerned, is not whether we can do what we choose to do, but whether we can choose our own choice, whether the choice itself issues in accordance with law from some antecedent.
Brand Blanshard


There are a lot of myths which make the human race cruel and barbarous and unkind. Good and Evil, Sin and Crime, Free Will and the like delusions made to excuse God for damning men and to excuse men for crucifying each other.
Clarence Darrow


Punishment as punishment is not admissible unless the offender has had the free will to select his course.
Clarence Darrow


Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws.
Charles Darwin

We like to forget that in fact everything in our life is chance, from our genesis out of the encounter of spermatozoon and egg onward.
Sigmund Freud

Man is a masterpiece of creation if for no other reason than that, all the weight of evidence for determinism notwithstanding, he believes he has free will.
Georg C. Lichtenberg


A self is a repertoire of behavior appropriate to a given set of contingencies.
B. F. Skinner

Prosperity and adversity, life and death, poverty and riches, come of the Lord.
Ecclesiasticus 11:14

To say that a man is sinful because he sins is to give an operational definition of sin. To say that he sins because he is sinful is to trace his behavior to a supposed inner trait. But whether or not a person engages in the kind of behavior called sinful depends upon circumstances which are not mentioned in either question. The sin assigned as an inner possession (the sin a person "knows") is to be found in a history of reinforcement.
B. F. Skinner


In the mind there is no absolute or free will; but the mind is determined to wish this or that by a cause, which has also been determined by another cause, and this last by another cause, and so on to infinity."
Baruch Spinoza


Everything happens through immutable laws, ...everything is necessary... There are, some persons say, some events which are necessary and others which are not. It would be very comic that one part of the world was arranged, and the other were not; that one part of what happens had to happen and that another part of what happens did not have to happen. If one looks closely at it, one sees that the doctrine contrary to that of destiny is absurd; but there are many people destined to reason badly; others not to reason at all others to persecute those who reason.
Voltaire

Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will.
Jawaharlal Nehru

There but for the grace of my determinants go I.
Peter Gill



I'm a victim of coicumstances!
Curly Howard

Chance, too, which seems to rush along with slack reins, is bridled and governed by law.
Boethius

Probability is expectation founded upon partial knowledge. A perfect acquaintance with all the circumstances affecting the occurrence of an event would change expectation into certainty, and leave neither room nor demand for a theory of probabilities.
George Boole

The conception of chance enters in the very first steps of scientific activity in virtue of the fact that no observation is absolutely correct. I think chance is a more fundamental conception that causality; for whether in a concrete case, a cause-effect relation holds or not can only be judged by applying the laws of chance to the observation.
Max Born

Give me a dozen health infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one of them at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select--doctor, lawyer…beggar man…thief.
JB Watson

“We are enslaved,” says Richard Dawkins, “by selfish molecules …. They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. …. they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines."


Probability is the very guide of life.
Cicero

[Upon proving that the best betting stragegy for Gambler's Ruin was to bet all on the first trial.] It is true that a man who does this is a fool. I have only proved that a man who does anything else is an even bigger fool.
Julian Lowell Coolidge

How many really basic mathematical objects are there? One is surely the `miraculous' jar of the positive integers 1, 2, 3 . . . Another is the concept of a fair coin. Though gambling was rife in the ancient world and although prominent Greeks and Romans sacrificed to Tyche, the goddess of luck, her coin did not arrive on the mathematical scene until the Renaissance. Perhaps one of the things that had delayed this was a metaphysical position which held that God speaks to humans through the action of chance. . . . The modern theory begins with the expulsion of Tyche from the Pantheon. There emerges the vision of the fair coin, the biased coin. This coin exists in some mental universe and all modern writers on probability theory have access to it. They toss it regularly and they speculate about what they 'observe.'"
Philip Davis and Rueben Hersh, The Mathematical Experience


Everything existing in the universe is the fruit of chance.
Democritus

It is a truth very certain that when it is not in our power to determine what is true we ought to follow what is most probable.
Descartes

I will never believe that god plays dice with the universe.
Einstein, Albert


The 'Law of Frequency of Error' . . . reigns with serentiy and in complete self-effacement amidst the wildest confusion. The huger the mob . . . the more perfrect is its sway. It is the supreme law of Unreason. Whenever a large sample of chaotic elements are taken in hand . . . an unsuspected and most beautiful form of regularity proves to have been latent all along.
Franics Galton


Misunderstanding of probability may be the greatest of all impediments to scientific literacy.
Stephen Jay Gould

Probability does pervade the universe, and in this sense, the old chestnut about baseball imitating life really has validity. The statistics of streaks and slumps, properly understood, do teach an important lesson about epistemology, and life in general. The history of a species, or any natural phenomenon, that requires unbroken continuity in a world of trouble, works like a batting streak. All are games of a gambler playing with a limited stake against a house with infinite resources. The gambler must eventually go bust. His aim can only be to stick around as long as possible, to have some fun while he's at it, and, if he happens to be a moral agent as well, to worry about staying the course with honor!
Stephen Jay Gould

Steinhaus, with his predilection for metaphors, used to quote a Polish proverb, `Forturny kolem sie tocza' [Luck runs in circles], to explain why Pi, so intimately connected with circles, keeps cropping up in probability theory and statistics, the two disciplines which deal with randomness and luck.
Mark Kac, Enigmas of Chance

Nothing occurs at random, but everything for a reason and by necessity.
Leucippus


A man must have chaos yet within him to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
Friedrich Nietzsche

The excitement that a gambler feels when making a bet is equal to the amount he might win times the probability of winning it.
Blaise Pascal

Chance favors the prepared mind.
Louis Pasteur

The record of a month's roulette playing at Monte Carlo can afford us material for discussing the foundations of knowledge.
Karl Pearson

Suam habet fortuna rationem. (Chance has its reasons.)
Petronius


I know too well that these arguments from probabilities are imposters, and unless great caution is observed in the use of them, they are apt to be deceptive.
Plato

There are two times in a man's life when he should not speculate; when he can't afford it, and when he can.
Mark Twain

Always be a little improbable.
Oscar Wilde

The first dogma which I came to disbelieve was that of free will. It seemed to me that all notions of matter were determined by the laws of dynamics and could not therefore be influenced by human wills.
Bertrand Russell

A self is a repertoire of behavior appropriate to a given set of contingencies.
B. F. Skinner



It is impossible to trap modern physics into predicting anything with perfect determinism because it deals with probabilities from the outset.
Arthur Eddington

There are a lot of myths which make the human race cruel and barbarous and unkind. Good and Evil, Sin and Crime, Free Will and the like delusions made to excuse God for damning men and to excuse men for crucifying each other.
Clarence Darrow

The world changed from having the determinism of a clock to having the contingency of a pinball machine.
Heinz R. Pagels

Whether or not we have personality disturbances, whether or not we have the ability to overcome deficiencies of early environment, is like the answer to the question whether or not we shall be struck down by a dread disease: "it's all a matter of luck." It is important to keep this in mind, for people almost always forget it, with consequences in human intolerance and unnecessary suffering that are incalculable.
John Hospers

The probable is what usually happens.
Aristotle

How dare we speak of the laws of chance? Is not chance the antithesis of all law?
Joseph Bertrand


The enormous value of the concept of free will in relieving parental shame and guilt is the only and overriding reason, in our opinion, that the lie of free will is well nigh universally taught to all children. If and when we can convince parents of total determinism, so they are freed from their own shame and guilt, they will no longer need to teach the vicious lie of free will to the world's children. A new world will be born.
Peter Gill


The first dogma which I came to disbelieve was that of free will. It seemed to me that all notions of matter were determined by the laws of dynamics and could not therefore be influenced by human wills.
Bertrand Russell


The initial configuration of the universe may have been chosen by God, or it may itself have been determined by the laws of science. In either case, it would seem that everything in the universe would then be determined by evolution according to the laws of science, so it is difficult to see how we can be masters of our fate.
Stephen Hawking


You will say that I feel free. This is an illusion, which may be compared to that of the fly in the fable, who, upon the pole of a heavy carriage, applauded himself for directing its course. Man, who thinks himself free, is a fly who imagines he has power to move the universe, while he is himself unknowingly carried along by it.
Baron d'Hobach


Whether or not we have personality disturbances, whether or not we have the ability to overcome deficiencies of early environment, is like the answer to the question whether or not we shall be struck down by a dread disease: "it's all a matter of luck." It is important to keep this in mind, for people almost always forget it, with consequences in human intolerance and unnecessary suffering that are incalculable.
John Hospers


Everything, including that which happens in our brains, depends on these and only on these: A set of fixed, deterministic laws. A purely random set of accidents.
Marvin Minsky