Probability Quotations

Maybe we should teach schoolchildren probability theory and investment risk management.

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 nether room nor demand for a theory of probabilities.

Sometimes the probabilities are very close to certainties, but they're never really certainties

We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

Entropy theory, on the other hand, is not concerned with the probability of succession in a series of items but with the overall distribution of kinds of items in a given arrangement.

I have found, unfortunately, that if I take on too many projects at one time, there is a higher probability of those projects sucking.

We must become more comfortable with probability and uncertainty.

Philosophy goes no further than probabilities, and in every assertion keeps a doubt in reserve.

The consequences of an act affect the probability of its occurring again.

The scientific imagination always restrains itself within the limits of probability.

Before you invest, you must ensure that you have realistically assessed your probability of being right and how you will react to the consequences of being wrong.

A reasonable probability is the only certainty.

Death is always a constant possibility and probability and of course an inevitability, as well.

History cannot be reduced to a set of statistics and probabilities.

All knowledge degenerates into probability.

In corporation [corporate] religions as in others, the heretic must be cast out not because of the probability that he is wrong but because of the possibility that he is right.

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

The Law of Probabilities: the more things you try, the more likely one of them will work.

If Death stepped miraculously through the glass and came in after you, in all probability you just got up and went along with him, ferociously but quietly.

and realized that death was not only a permanent probability, as he had always believed, but an immediate reality.

We cannot live on probabilities. The faith in which we can live bravely and die in peace must be a certainty, so far as it professes to be a faith at all, or it is nothing.

When asked what he meant by a miracle: Oh, anything with a probability of less than 20%.

What I'm trying to do is to maximise the probability of the future being better.

The province of faith begins where probabilities cease and sight and sense fail.

In no other branch of mathematics is it so easy for experts to blunder as in probability theory.

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

Probability and expectation are not the same. Its probability and probability times the pay off.

Hope does not always require probability.

If judged only by the results that challenge the laws of probabilities,...

A pinch of probability is worth a pound of perhaps.

I would have to say the probability of us dying seems extremely high.

Probability is the guide of life, and of death, too.

Variant: When it is not in our power to follow what is true, we ought to follow what is most probable.

Any universe that could have preceded consciousness only existed in a probability state.

I think the probability of a supernatural creator existing is very very low,

If a guy tells me the probability of failure is 1 in 100,000, I know he's full of crap.

One of the most striking and fundamental things about probability theory is that it leads to an understanding of the otherwise strange fact that events which are individually capricious and unpredictable can, when treated en masse, lead to very stable average performances.

It is a part of probability that many improbable things will happen.

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

The more people you contact, the higher your sales will be because of the law of probabilities.

We often regret we did not do otherwise, when that very otherwise would, in all probability, have done for us.

Fear was stronger than the calculation of probabilities.

An ingenious web of probabilities is the surest screen a wise man can place between himself and the truth.

Take a dose of medicine once, and in all probability you will be obliged to take an additional hundred afterwards

Arguments derived from probabilities are idle.

Almost all life depends on probabilities.