Contingency Quotes

“Hope may inspire and inveigle us, but we cannot just live on hope. Certainly, love can be hope, but it is merely a contingency, since it might either mend our life or break our heart. (" Waiting for the smoke signals ")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Whereas some dwell on the bright side of life, enjoying an exciting spectrum of contingencies, and get all the breaks, others live in the confined inner court of their being, cramped within the fence of their mind. Only imagination may arouse a spark of expectation, stir up resilience and create an equitable prospect.”
― Erik Pevernagie

“And even, if circumstances required, a contingency plan for his contingency plan's contingency plan.”
― Frank Beddor, Seeing Redd

“Not having a contingency plan or never performing risk analysis and mitigation activities is like not having an insurance plan for yourself.”
― Pooja Agnihotri, 17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail:Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure

“But do you imagine there’s a certain type of person in the world who conforms to the idea of a ‘bad person'? You’ll never find someone who fits that mold neatly, you know. On the whole, all people are good, or at least they’re normal. The frightening thing is that they can suddenly turn bad when it comes to the crunch. That’s why you have to be careful.”
― Natsume Sōseki, Kokoro

“When you walk into your memories, you are opening a door to the past; the road within has many branches, and the route is different every time.”
― Xinran, The Good Women of China: Hidden Voices

“Beauty
Is the fume-track of necessity. This thought
Is therapeutic.

If, after several
Applications, you do not find
Relief, consult your family physician”
― Robert Penn Warren, The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren

“Sometimes life can be unexpected. Sometimes things surprise you and all you can do is roll with the punches or let them beat you to a bloody pulp. -Sage Hannigan, Contingency”
― P. S. Martinez

“Seriously, this old woman had no idea how close she came to being squashed like a roach. -Sage Hannigan, Contingency”
― P. S. Martinez

“I was either still dreaming or I had entered an alternate reality where I was a flippin' insane person. I doubted I had entered an alternate reality and a quick slap to my own face proved I wasn't still dreaming. -Sage Hannigan, Contingency”
― P. S. Martinez

“All religions, nearly all philosophies, and even a part of science testify to the unwearying, heroic effort of mankind desperately denying its contingency.”
― Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology

“[Foucault's] criticism is not transcendental, and its goal is not that of making a metaphysics possible: it is genealogical in its design and archaeological in its method.

Archaeological –and not transcendental– in the sense that it will not seek to identify the universal structures of all knowledge or of all possible moral action, but will seek to treat the instances of discourse that articulate what we think, say, and do as so many historical events.

And this critique will be genealogical in the sense it will not deduce from the form of what we are what is impossible for us to do and to know; but it will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do or think. It is not seeking to make possible a metaphysics that has finally become a science; it is seeking to give new impetus, as far and wide as possible, to the undefined work of freedom.”
― Paul Rabinow, The Foucault Reader

“Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following upon another as wave follows upon wave, only one great fact with respect to which, since it is unique, there can be no generalizations; only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.”
― H.A.L. Fisher, History of Europe: v. 1

“An egg is a chemical process, but it is not a mere chemical process. It is one that is going places—even when, in our world of chance and contingency, it ends up in an omelet and not in a chicken. Though it surely be a chemical process, we cannot understand it adequately without knowing the kind of chicken it has the power to become.”
― John Randall

“In thinking the of the eternal, we must link the eternal with the accidentality of our thinking”
― G.W.F Hegel

“Redundancy is my favourite business strategy.”
― Amit Kalantri

“To protect your interests in your transactions when making an offer you’ll often use at least one—and maybe several—contingencies.”
― J Scott

“Did you consider anything like the Infected?' Simon had asked.

'Not quite. But some of our other contingency plans might help us out with this particular mission.”
― L. Ashley Straker, Infected Connection

“Contingency cannot be a contingent phenomenon. All unforeseen circumstances have unknown causes.”
― Elmar Hussein

“In line with the total assault of scientific investigation and critical rationality on our most well-cherished and established intuitions, why should we expect the characteristics of reality to be trivial extensions of characteristics specific to the temporal-causal perspective of the subject? [...]
Liberation from a model of time restricted to a particular contingent constitution does not rob the subject of its cognitive and practical abilities, but releases it from the shackles of its most entrenched dogmas about the necessity of the contingent features of its experience. In doing so, it sheds light on the prospects of what the subject of experience and the exercise of change in the world is and can be as it cognitively matures. The transition to a state where one is no longer afraid of being lost in time, having come to the realization that time accommodates no one, should be celebrated as the sign of rational maturity, rather than decried as a manifestation of the subject's impotency. It is in continuity with the critical attitude of rational agency to adopt a model of experience that can interrogate the most natural and established 'facts of experience' rather than corroborating them via the so-called fact that these are simply the ways in which we experience the world. As the extension of this interrogation, such a model should also enlarge the field of our experience, and in doing so, should theoretically and practically challenge popular yet puerile ideologies built around either a temporal account of progress or the second law of thermodynamics.”
― Reza Negarestani, Intelligence and Spirit

“Like most visionary utopias, though. IDN (Integrated Data Network) was never to be. Perhaps it was simply too ambitious a project: infrastructures seldom respond to a single vision or a master plan, as Paul Edwards (2010) writes, and conjuring up a platform that would serve the entire marketplace was an almost Quixotic task. Infrastructures emerge not through planning and calculated foresight, but through the meandering paths of history, in the mangle of making, tinkering, and wrestling with the obduracy of organizations, practices, and their installed base. The system eventually introduced for Big Bang reflected this fragility and contingency of infrastructures: it was the creative result of reshaping legacy devices into a system that did the job for the time being. A band-aid. A product of creative, recombinant bricolage.”
― Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, Automating Finance: Infrastructures, Engineers, and the Making of Electronic Markets

“Charles Kahn offers the following summary of how a new metaphysics takes shape in Islamic philosophy:
'My general view of the historical development is that existence in the modern sense becomes a central concept in philosophy only in the period when Greek ontology is radically revised in the light of a metaphysics of creation; that is to say, under the influence of biblical religion. As far as I can see, this development did not take place with Augustine or with the Greek Church Fathers, who remained under the sway of classical ontology. The new metaphysics seems to have taken shape in Islamic philosophy, in the form of a radical distinction between necessary and contingent existence: between the existence of God on the one hand, and that of the created world on the other.'
The new metaphysics that takes shape in Islamic philosophy proves fateful for subsequent philosophy in various ways. What will interest us immediately below is how it plays a role in triggering a debate about how to conceive divine creation. What will be of implicit interest later in these replies is how a remarkably unvarnished version of this new metaphysics comes to be detached from its original theological context. The ensuing detheologized modal metaphysics remains in force in some quarters of analytic philosophy, even though it takes its point of departure from a topic (how to understand the act of divine creation) that is no longer of much interest to most analytic philosophers. For the new metaphysics introduces concepts and ways of thinking that, once divested of their theological garb, continually resurface in the history of philosophy up to the present day.”
― James Conant, The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics

“your contingency plan is as important as your business plan.”
― Pooja Agnihotri

“Evaluation must be done in hindsight, after the work has been done, not for proposals for work to be done. That said, secondary factors must carry some weigh, because research results depend too much on historical contingency and luck. As articulated by Ralph Bown, vice president of research at Bell Labs from 1951 to 1955:
'A conviction on the part of employees that meritorious performance will be honestly appraised and adequately rewarded is a necessary ingredient of their loyalty. This appraisal, to be fair and convincing, must be based on the individual's performance and capabilities rather than wholly on the direct value of his results. A system which rewards only those lucky enough to strike an idea which pays off handsomely will not have the cooperative teamwork needed for vitality of the enterprise as a whole.”
― Venkatesh Narayanamurti, The Genesis of Technoscientific Revolutions: Rethinking the Nature and Nurture of Research

“The brain homology hypothesis entails losses across the board, with more than 75 percent of existing animal phyla having quite literally lost their heads and exhibiting secondarily degenerated nervous systems. In contrast, the convergence scenario does not require any brain/head/eye losses in the bilaterian phyla that lack these features, because in that hypothesis these groups never had them in the first place. Instead, the heavy lifting for the convergene hypothesis comes through its remarkable postulation that brains originated from primeval nervous systems at least three or four times within Bilateria. Both the homology scenario. and the convergence scenario seem improbable, and yet one of them must be true.
Given that both scenarios are consistent with the extant phylogenetic distribution of nervous systems, which hypothesis offers the better explanation of the observed data? [...] The scientific jury is still deliberating and far from a verdict. We are therefore venturing into the frontiers of scientific knowledge.”
― Russell Powell, Contingency and Convergence: Toward a Cosmic Biology of Body and Mind

“The photograph not only stops time, Benjamin argues, but also works to project the future out of the past. The photograph is a forward-looking document, so to speak, anticipating a future viewer who will recognise in it a spark of contingency that cannot be contained to one temporal moment. As Benjamin puts it in his" Little History of Photography ":" No matter how artful the photographer, no matter how carefully posed his subject, the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the here and now, with which reality has (so to speak) seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future nests so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it.”
― Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography and the Optical Unconscious