Probability Quotes
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Consider the case of a person who holds a view with probability 1. Then coherence says that it is no use having a debate with them because nothing will change their mind.
Dennis Lindley
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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.
Rudolf Arnheim
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If WE claim only reasonable probability, it will be as much as men who love the truth can ever at any given moment hope to have within their grasp.
William James
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Fame, we may understand, is no sure test of merit, but only a probability of such: it is an accident, not a property, of a man; like light, it can give little or nothing, but at most may show what is given.
Thomas Carlyle
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Should the States reject this excellent Constitution, the probability is, an opportunity will never again offer to cancel another in peacethe next will be drawn in blood.
George Washington
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Even very low-probability events can, and indeed do, occur.
Gavin Extence
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It is dangerous to attach probability zero to anything other than a logical impossibility.
Dennis Lindley
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Anything is possible, but not always probable. Innovators increase the probability of the impossible.
Braden Kelley
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Whatever way uncertainty is approached, probability is the only sound way to think about it.
Dennis Lindley
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Almost all thinking people agree that you should not have probability 1 (or 0) for any event, other than one demonstrable by logic, like 2 x 2 = 4.
Dennis Lindley
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The stone that Dr. Johnson once kicked to demonstrate the reality of matter has become dissipated in a diffuse distribution of mathematical probabilities. The ladder that Descartes, Galileo, Newton, and Leibniz erected in order to scale the heavens rests upon a continually shifting, unstable foundation.
Morris Kline
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The source of Pyrrhonism comes from failing to distinguish between a demonstration, a proof and a probability. A demonstration supposes that the contradictory idea is impossible; a proof of fact is where all the reasons lead to belief, without there being any pretext for doubt; a probability is where the reasons for belief are stronger than those for doubting.
Andrew Michael Ramsay
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Investing is not a natural science but rather a social science. So, it's never purely empirical; what you are trying to do is everything you possibly can to enhance your probabilities of being right more often than being wrong.
William Browne
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One of the most basic and pervasive social processes is the sorting and labeling of things, activities, and people... Sorting and labeling processes involve a trade-off of costs and benefits. In general, the more finely the sorting is done, the greater the benefits - and the costs... Sorting and labeling, whether of people or of things, is a sorting and labeling of probabilities rather than of certainties.
Thomas Sowell
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It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection. We are supposed to abandon this naïve response, not in favor of a fully worked out physical/chemical explanation but in favor of an alternative that is really a schema for explanation, supported by some examples. What is lacking, to my knowledge, is a credible argument that the story has a nonnegligible probability of being true.
Thomas Nagel
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The probability of life originating from accident is comparable to the probability of the Unabridged Dictionary resulting from an explosion in a printing factory.
Edwin Conklin
