Top 55 Probability Quotes

There may be aliens in our Milky Way galaxy, and there are billions of other galaxies. The probability is almost certain that there is life somewhere in space.

Frankly, I’ve had the opportunity to get certain accolades, make it to the conference finals, get awards, all this other stuff that doesn’t matter. I’m looking only on championship probability. I just feel like I haven’t accomplished much unless I can somehow get that done.

Psychology helps to measure the probability that an aim is attainable.

The fact that we don’t keep repeating tests in the same arena is not because the probability of the hypothesis showing its falsity in other arenas goes up after it has passed tests in one arena.

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.

In trials of fact, by oral testimony, the proper inquiry is not whether is it possible that the testimony may be false, but whether there is sufficient probability that it is true.

In the U.S.A. or Europe there is no realistic way to estimate the type, magnitude, or probability of the risk, nor any way to narrow down the potentially affected regions.

Investing is about predicting the future, and the future is inherently unpredictable. Therefore, the only way you can do better is to assess all the facts and truly know what you know and know what you don’t know. That’s your probability edge.

I think we worry way too much about where books should fit inside genres. In a romance, the hero and heroine are on a journey together, and no matter how awful it gets, by the end of the book they’ll be in love, with the probability of a happy ending.

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

The nice thing about baseball is that all of the possible outcomes are known – it’s not quite as messy as the real world. That makes the game an excellent playground for probability.

We must become more comfortable with probability and uncertainty.

One important measurement issue concerns the fat tails problem that I mentioned earlier. VAR is concerned with extreme outcomes. If the tails of the probability distributions we are using are too thin, our VAR measures are likely to be too low.

Every company needs to have a skunkworks, to try things that have a high probability of failing. You try to minimize failure, but at the same time, if you’re not willing to try things that are inherently risky, you’re not going to make progress.

It is time to recognise that austerity alone condemns not just Greece but the whole of Europe to the probability of a painful and protracted era of little or no economic growth. This would be a tragedy not just for Greece and for Europe, but for the world.

We don’t know the probabilities of future events. Still, you have to take action, and so you do it on gut feeling. That’s the world we live in.

I like – I love calculus. I love linear algebra, probability and statistics, that kind of stuff. I just really like that.

The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just.

Hope is not the basis for policy. Wise policymakers analyze major issues such as immigration carefully and look at facts and probabilities instead of just hoping for the best.

On the relationship side, if you teach people to respond actively and constructively when someone they care about has a victory, it increases love and friendship and decreases the probability of depression.

At one level, SXSW exemplifies serendipity, because whenever I come, I get these unexpected meetings with people I never knew existed, and you couldn’t have planned it. But by making the choice to come to SXSW, I’m increasing the probability of those encounters.

The probability of failure doesn’t matter to me.

The uniformity of the earth’s life, more astonishing than its diversity, is accountable by the high probability that we derived, originally, from some single cell, fertilized in a bolt of lightning as the earth cooled.

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

A lot of boys in my poker circle are mathematicians who play on probability. I don’t have that kind of brain, so I rely on instinct. But I recently found out that poker and cards in general go way back in my family gene pool.

I found maths very easy, but I still enjoyed discovering things. You have to have the necessary information. For example, what’s the difference between the mean and the median? Probability fascinated me. You have to think very carefully about things, which is the way my mind works anyway.

It would be so weird if we knew just as much as we needed to know to answer all the questions of the universe. Wouldn’t that be freaky? Whereas the probability is high that there is a vast reality that we have no way to perceive, that’s actually bearing down on us now and influencing everything.

Excess dietary salt is most notorious for increasing blood pressure. Americans have a 90 percent lifetime probability of developing high blood pressure – so even if your blood pressure is normal now, if you continue to eat the typical American diet, you will be at risk.

It’s not about the pace, it’s about the direction we’ve set. The pace is of course a function of many factors, including the magnitude of the supply shock. But what’s probably more important is the probability of the supply shock translating into sustainable embedded inflation.

The true and the approximately true are apprehended by the same faculty; it may also be noted that men have a sufficient natural instinct for what is true, and usually do arrive at the truth. Hence the man who makes a good guess at truth is likely to make a good guess at probabilities.

The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle.

It is almost possible to predict one or two days in advance, within a rather broad range of probability, what the weather is going to be; it is even thought that it will not be impossible to publish daily forecasts, which would be very useful to soci.

In an environment where you’ve got to push innovations out the door fast and keep the cost of innovation low, the probability that you’ll be successful is actually much higher.

Past experience, on the shuttle and the Titan rockets, suggests that large multi-segment solid rockets have a probability of failure of 0.5 to 1 per cent.

The vast majority of large scale change efforts fail. Which means that the probability that you have actually experienced a failure, and your people know that and are pessimistic, therefore, about trying something again, is very high.

I am not from a film family or a Mumbai girl. The probability of getting a second chance is low, and so one has to be more careful.

The beauty of any conspiracy theory is that because it can’t be proved, that just makes it more ‘real.’ It’s not a question of believing or not believing, really; it’s more a question of just accepting a series of probabilities that lead to an undeniable conclusion.

If we look at the way the universe behaves, quantum mechanics gives us fundamental, unavoidable indeterminacy, so that alternative histories of the universe can be assigned probability.

Physics tells us observations can’t be predicted absolutely. Rather, there’s a range of possible observations each with a different probability.

When you do life a certain way, it’s bound to give you a higher level of probability to succeed, and that’s what we preach.

They were being driven to a prison, through no fault of their own, in all probability for life. In comparison, how much easier it would be to walk to the gallows than to this tomb of living horrors!

A scientist worthy of a lab coat should be able to make original discoveries while wearing a clown suit, or give a lecture in a high squeaky voice from inhaling helium. It is written nowhere in the math of probability theory that one may have no fun.

From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.

The probability I knock out Chael Sonnen is very big. Man, everybody knows his game. He is never going to take me down and I’m going to break his nose with my knee.

A property in the 100-year floodplain has a 96 percent chance of being flooded in the next hundred years without global warming. The fact that several years go by without a flood does not change that probability.

I find fault with my children because I like them and I want them to go places – uprightness and strength and courage and civil respect and anything that affects the probabilities of failure on the part of those that are closest to me, that concerns me – I find fault.

Is it 10 years, 20, 50 before we reach that tipping point where climate change becomes irreversible? Nobody can know. There’s clearly a probability distribution. We need to ensure this planet, and we need to do it quickly.