This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
What is it that makes natural selection succeed as a solution to the problem of improbability, whereas chance and design both fail at the starting gate? The answer is that natural selection is a cumulative process, which breaks the problem of improbability up into small pieces. Each of the small pieces is slightly improbable, but not prohibitively so.
Yet scientists are required to back up their claims not with private feelings but with publicly checkable evidence. Their experiments must have rigorous controls to eliminate spurious effects. And statistical analysis eliminates the suspicion (or at least measures the likelihood) that the apparent effect might have happened by chance alone.
Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman
The chance is high that the truth lies in the fashionable direction. But, on the off chance that it is in another direction, a direction obvious from an unfashionable view of field theory, who will find it? Only someone who has sacrificed himself by teaching himself quantum electrodynamics from a peculiar and unfashionable point of view; one that he may have to invent for himself.
Richard Wagner, fully Wilhelm Richard Wagner
If you have a better defensive system, the attacker has to work that much harder, recruit more people, put on more shielding, ... The bigger the operation gets, the better chance our people have of detecting and stopping it.
The attendant on William Rufus, who discharged at a deer an arrow, which glanced against a tree and killed the king, was no murderer, because he had no such design. And, on the other hand, a man who should lie in wait to assassinate another, and pull the trigger of a gun with that intent, would be morally a murderer, not the less though the gun should chance to miss fire.
Richard Wright, fully Richard Nathaniel Wright
I listened, vaguely knowing now that I had committed some awful wrong that I could not undo, that I had uttered words I could not recall even though I ached to nullify them, kill them, turn back time to the moment before I had talked so that I could have another chance to save myself.
Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon
1 in 10 chance perhaps, but save Chile! worth spending; not concerned; no involvement of embassy; $10,000,00 available, more if necessary; full-time job
Richard E. Byrd, fully Richard Evelyn Byrd, Jr.
The human race cannot go forward without liberty. If this be correct, then all people everywhere should strive for liberty. If they achieve liberty, they will get a chance to pursue happiness and perhaps will be able to develop toward the ultimate goal of creation.
Richard E. Byrd, fully Richard Evelyn Byrd, Jr.
in accidents blindness chance conviction cosmology day death despair doubt feeling force harmony heart intelligence listening music Peace purpose reason Silence universe
Chance | Day | Death | Despair | Doubt | Force | Harmony | Heart | Intelligence | Listening | Music | Peace | Purpose | Purpose | Reason | Silence |
Richard Wagner, fully Wilhelm Richard Wagner
The utter childishness of our provincial public's verdict upon any art-manifestation that may chance to make its first appearance in their own theatre
Appearance | Chance |
Men first make up their minds (and the smaller the mind the sooner made up), and then seek for the reasons; and if they chance to stumble upon a good reason, of course they do not reject it. But though they are right, they are only right by chance.
Childhood may have periods of great happiness, but it also has times that must simply be endured. Childhood at its best is a form of slavery tempered by affection.
An old friend of mine who died recently at a great age was, in infancy, held on the knee of an elderly godmother who had been, in her infancy, held on the knee of yet another godmother who had been held on the knee of Queen Anne, who died in 1714. Viewed unsympathetically, this is nothing, a chance association-by-knees; yet if we cherish life, and are not mere creatures of death and sepulcher, deluded by the notion that only our own experience is real and our demise the end of the world, we see in it a reminder that we are all beads on a string
Being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.
Chance |
I was not sure I wanted to issue orders to life; I rather liked the Greek notion of allowing Chance to take a formative hand in my affairs.
Chance |