The bad player is the one who tries to calculate and play with the odds, as if his game, his life, were one of a large number of games. To do so is at best to succumb to another necessity, the necessity of large numbers. The good player does not fool himself, and accepts that there is exactly one chance, which produces by chance the necessity and even the purpose that he experiences.

If you were just intent on killing people you could do better with a bomb made of agricultural fertiliser.

Plutonium has a quite extraordinary relationship with people. They made it, and it kills them.

By legend and perhaps by nature philosophers are more accustomed to the armchair than the workbench.

Cutting up fowl to predict the future is, if done honestly and with as little interpretation as possible, a kind of randomization. But chicken guts are hard to read and invite flights of fancy or corruption.

In each case you settle on an act. Doing nothing at all counts as an act.

Every once in a while, something happens to you that makes you realise that the human race is not quite as bad as it so often seems to be.