Probability Quotes

“Critical thinking is an active and ongoing process. It requires that we all think like Bayesians, updating our knowledge as new information comes in.”
― Daniel J. Levitin, A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age

“He who ignores the law of probabilities challenges an adversary that is seldom beaten.”
― Ambrose Bierce, Killed at Resaca

“If the universe doesn't remember, why should you? Being the youngest of three siblings, you can bet I was the subject of some vile comments. Fat, stupid, you name it. However, just because my brother called me an idiot for 12 years doesn't make it my reality. Your past never equals your future unless you allow it.

Think about a coin flip. No matter how many times it's flipped, the next flip is always random. Probability cannot be attached to a future flip based on the past. Your past is the same. Just because you failed at five relationships doesn't mean your next will fail, especially if you learn from them! Just because you flipped burgers three hours ago doesn't mean you can't be a millionaire next year. The universe forgets, just like the universe forgot I mopped floors and delivered pizza not long ago.”
― M.J. DeMarco, The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime!

“Everything in our life is a probability apart from two facts – Birth and Death”
― Anupama Garg, The Tantric Curse

“The wavefunction tells us where we might potentially find an electron when we look; but what we do find in any given experiment is random, and we can’t meaningfully say why we find it here rather than there.”
― Philip Ball, Beyond Weird

“​It's Hard, Not to Fail, but, there is Always a Chance of Success. Of course, there is No Chance of Success, if You didn't Try.”
― Vineet Raj Kapoor

“The wave quality of light is the same as that of the electron. The wave determines the probable location of the photon of light when it is detected. The wave character of light is not vibrating stuff like a wave of water but rather a wavelike function encoding information about where you'll find the photon of light once it is detected. Until it reaches the detector plate, like the electron, it is seemingly passing through both slits simultaneously, making its mind up about its location only once it is observed [...].
It's this act of observation that is such a strange feature of quantum physics. Until I ask the detector to pick up where the electron is, the particle should be thought of as probabilistically distributed over space, with a probability described by a mathematical function that has wavelike characteristics. The effect of the two slits on this mathematical wave function alters it in such a way that the electron is forbidden from being located at some points on the detector plate. But when the particle is observed, the die is cast, probabilities disappear, and the particle must decide on a location.”
― Marcus du Sautoy, The Great Unknown: Seven Journeys to the Frontiers of Science

“It is not the absolute degree of probability that matters, only its relative probability compared with other possible alternatives.

It is the simple suggestion that the only valid reason for rejecting a statistical hypothesis is that some alternative explains the observed events with a greater degree of probability.”
― Herbert I. Weisberg, Willful Ignorance: The Mismeasure of Uncertainty

“It’s like winning a lottery. Although the odds are astronomical, most weeks, someone hits the jackpot.”
― Stephen Hawking

“Most things are never meant.

-Going, Going”
― Philip Larkin, High Windows

“No probability, however seductive, can protect us from error; even if all parts of a problem seem to fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, one has to remember that the probable need not necessarily be the truth, and the truth not always probable.”
― Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism

“إنَّ الحدث الذي يعتبر بعيد الاحتمال أصلًا يتوافر على حظوظ ضئيلة للوقوع ، و لهذا فهو يدهشنا عند وقوعه”
― Elise janvresse, قانون تسلسل الأحداث.. هل هو صدفة أم حتمية؟

“Yet Laplace had built his probability theory on intuition. As far as he was concerned," essentially, the theory of probability is nothing but good common sense reduced to mathematics. It provides an exact appreciation of what sound minds feel with a kind of instinct, frequently without being able to account for it.”
― Sharon Bertsch McGrayne, The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy

“Sometimes I feel someone is playing with my life. But then I realize it’s probably just me, playing with myself.”
― Robert Black

“A cat has nine lives but a Schrodinger cat is both dead and alive at the same time....”
― Ankala Subbarao

“There is no easy or difficult task, there is only possibility or impossibility.”
― Shaynee Gokool

“هناك أحداث كثيرة بعيدة الاحتمال ، إلى درجة أننا ننكون شبه متأكدين من إمكانية وقوع بعضها ، و في هذه الحالة سيكون عدم وقوعها هو المثير الاستغراب”
― Elise Janvresse, قانون تسلسل الأحداث.. هل هو صدفة أم حتمية؟

“The more energy taken, the less energy that is left for us to implement our goals and the smaller the probability of realization of our innate potential”
― Sunday Adelaja

“While most of us are comfortable acknowledging that luck plays a role in what we do, we have difficulty assessing its role after the fact. Once something has occurred and we can put together a story to explain it, it starts to seem like the outcome was predestined. Statistics don't appeal to our need to understand cause and effect, which is why they are so frequently ignored or misinterpreted. Stories, on the other hand, are a rich means to communicate precisely because they emphasize cause and effect.”
― Michael J. Mauboussin, The Success Equation

“A statistical anomaly does not prove wrongdoing. Delma Kinney, a fifty-year-old Atlanta man, won $1 million in an instant lottery in 2008 and then another $1 million in an instant game in 2011. The probability of that happening to the same person is somewhere in the range of 1 in 25 trillion.”
― Charles Wheelan, Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data

“Possibilities are hope in numbers. Even the most certain statement - your dinner at 7 pm - may not happen because many things can influence the change of events. What is taken for sure will score the highest likelihood, but never the certitude because the world runs on probabilities. Like a game.”
― Thomas Vato, Questology

“People’s emotional response to extremely long odds led them to reverse their usual taste for risk, and to become risk seeking when pursuing a long-shot gain and risk avoiding when faced with the extremely remote possibility of loss. (Which is why they bought both lottery tickets and insurance.)”
― Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project

“The wavefunction of superposed states doesn’t say anything about what the photon is ‘like’. It is a tool for letting you predict what you will measure. And what you will measure for a superposed state like this is that sometimes the measurement device registers a photon with a vertical polarization, and sometimes with a horizontal one. If the superposed state is described by a wavefunction that has an equal weighting of the vertical and horizontal wavefunctions, then 50% of your measurements will give the result ‘vertical’ and 50% will indicate ‘horizontal’. If you accept Bohr’s rigour/complacency (delete to taste), we don’t need to worry what the superposed state ‘is’ before making a measurement, but can just accept that such a state will sometimes give us one result and sometimes another, with a probability defined by the weightings of the superposed wavefunctions in the Schrödinger equation. It all adds up to a consistent picture.”
― Philip Ball, Beyond Weird

“We’re just two out of billions of people, on a rock orbiting a ball of fire, alive at a point in time that allows us to witness humanity make the biggest, most bewildering discoveries. Two people who could have been anywhere in the world, separated by time, space, circumstances. Yet after all we’ve been through, all that’s happened to us, here we are, now. Sharing this moment together. We’re not insignificant. We’re miracles.”
― Mina Rehman, Dead Girl Haunting

“There are, among one’s most generative extrapolations of trajectory, instances of exceptional beauty—or rather, instances of perception of exception to unexceptional beauty. And one loses therein a sense of time because a prediction of ‘now’ is interleaved rather often with those models of ‘then’ and ‘thereafter.’ Thus, we have these outlier instances in which purpose appears firmly rooted in ‘Something’; yet, so abbreviated are these that one is often left inexorably with the trauma of thinking of them as flukes, mere flashes of faulty wiring that have managed somehow to manifest a resemblance to a Something rather ‘spiritual’ in both flavor and texture; it is only natural for a kind of discomfiture to emerge out of this realization for this sidereal specter has passed all too quickly and with much of its purported grandeur now sinking with absurd melodrama into that cosmic abyss scraped by its wake, thitherto descending into nebulous depths and evading any hope of recapture and restoration. There are, in other words, these momentous waves of probabilistic ‘Something’ which curl in void and crash to a convergence of semblance and are soon thereafter to be strewn into fathomless Nihility.”
― Ashim Shanker

“There are two sides of a coin but multiple sides of human perspectives.”
― Amit Abraham

“anything is possible but probably not that”
― Jordan Peterson

“this book is part of what could be called a new wave in statistics teaching, in which formal probability theory as a basis for statistical inference does not come in till much later”
― David Spiegelhalter, The Art of Statistics: How to Learn from Data

“The notion of future mixed with chance, not a deterministic extension of your perception of the past, is a mental operation that our mind cannot perform.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“Keynes concluded that citizens both rich and poor would have to be led gradually out of capitalism, a base and repugnant system of morals. His fellow liberals in the 1920s debated the morality and efficacy of capitalism, as well as the correctness of the view that, as one Liberal politician put it, “man’s primary concern is to satisfy in ever ampler degree his physical needs.” For Keynes, this might be human nature, but his entanglement with Bateson and Pearson had immersed him in the notion that biological nature was malleable.
Greed would be driven out not just by education but by the eugenic cultivation of “special talents.” It would be replaced by “some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue—that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is detestable, that those walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom who take least thought for the morrow.” In the meantime, however, Keynes conceded capitalism’s efficacy. In order to improve productivity to the point where everyone’s needs could be easily satisfied, the coming century still demanded devotion to the god of greed. The goal of the next hundred years of capitalism would be its own extirpation.”
― David Roth Singerman