Popular quotes about Random! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 32
O! many a shaft, at random sent, Finds mark the archer little meant! And many a word, at random spoken, May soothe or wound a heart that's broken!
Walter ScottThe whole notion of passwords is based on an oxymoron. The idea is to have a random string that is easy to remember. Unfortunately, if it's easy to remember, it's something nonrandom like 'Susan.' And if it's random, like 'r7U2*Qnp,' then it's not easy to remember.
Bruce SchneierA random sequence is one that cannot be algorithmically compressed : the shortest description of a random sequence is simply the sequence itself.
Gregory ChaitinI've worked with all sorts of random people - everybody from Metallica to Britney Spears to Ozzy Osbourne to Michael Jackson to the Beastie Boys. I've got a really strange CV. It's interesting - I work with a lot of these disparate, different people to learn what it's like to work with random people.
MobyI began in 1976, with small abstract paintings that allowed me to do what I had never let myself do: put something down at random. And then, of course, I realized that it never can be random. It was all a way of opening a door for me. If I don't know what's coming - that is, if I have no hard-and-fast image, as I have with a photographic original - then arbitrary choice and chance play an important part.
Gerhard RichterI'm horrible at concepts. My life is random and my inspiration is random. But it's all written in a very specific time frame that says a lot about my life at the time.
Oh LandBut suppose we are nothing more than the sum of our first, naive, random behaviors. What then?
Dan ArielyThe question is: exactly how did life get here? Was it by natural selection and random mutation or was it by something else? Everybody - even Richard Dawkins - sees design in biology. You see this design when you see co-ordinated parts coming together to perform a function - like in a hand. And so it's the appearance of design that everybody's trying to explain. So that if Darwin's theory doesn't explain it we're left with no other explanation than maybe it really was designed. That's essentially the design argument.
Michael BeheI have a giant baking book, so I close my eyes and pick a random page. Whatever it is, I try to bake it!
Nina DobrevJust as a random thing, because I can't choose a favorite song ever, I'll go for Minnie Riperton's "Expecting".
Alison GoldfrappI think every job that you do gives you the opportunity to learn something new. As hokey as that sounds, that's why I have a problem saying no to my friends. That's why I do so many random comedy shows.
Busy PhilippsPick at random any three letters from the alphabet, put them in any order, and you will have an acronym designating a federal agency we can do without.
Milton FriedmanI want to fly a jet. I'd love to just be in the air and go mach 3 or mach 4. Or, I'd be an underwater salvager. I've always been fascinated with the Bermuda Triangle and Atlantis. I love chemistry, also. That's why acting is so random for me!
Kellan LutzMost of us, even if only for two minutes in our lives, have experienced at some time or another an inexplicable and random sense of complete bliss, unrelated to anything that was happening in the outside world.
Elizabeth GilbertI hadn't thought about the balance in mood. You see that we did it in alphabetical order, so if there's any kind of shape, or any kind of flow, it's random. Gender...we didn't think much about it. It was sort of interesting to see that women often were choosing women and men often were choosing men. And sometimes they wouldn't and that was fun. I didn't know that I would be excited by that, until I saw it happen.
Lorin SteinI'm working on one of the projects at a time and I'm the zone of that project. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with this, and I might experiment with it in the future, but I'm not a fan of just random assemblages of songs at the moment.
Bradford CoxOver millions of years the viruses in our genome mutate more and more so the look less and less and less recognizable as viruses and so if there was a virus that infected our pre mammal ancestors like 250 million years ago, which it probably did, we can't see it because it just looks totally random.
Carl ZimmerI think I've been addicted to openness since long before my rock career. I was terrible as a teenager. I used to go out of my way to make people uncomfortable with personal details. I was always fascinated by the idea that we have these weird, random boundaries between what we do and don't show.
Amanda PalmerWhen I was a kid - and I don't know why, it's the most random thing - I wanted to be a speech therapist for little kids. I knew I wanted to do something with kids.
Haylie DuffSilicon Valley isn't usually where aspiring authors go to kick-start a literary reputation. [...] How'd he do it? By courting bloggers and influential techies like Joi Ito, Stewart Brand, and Craig Newmark demonstrating that if you can get the geek grapevine on your side, you don't need Random House.
Daniel SuarezI also think that there's something about the graphic, political nature of such attacks, mixed with the fact that it all seems completely random to the victims.
Karan MahajanI was taught over and over again that the accumulation of random mutations led to evolutionary change - led to new species. I believed it until I looked for evidence.
Lynn MargulisSo when I open the door on Halloween, I am confronted by three or four imaginary heroes, such as G.I. Joe, Conan the Barbarian and Oliver North, who would look very terrifying except that they are three feet tall and facing in random directions. They stand there silently for several seconds before an adult voice hisses from the darkness behind them: "Say 'Trick or treat!
Dave BarryI run a lot. I do a lot of yoga. Hot yoga. Which is random and sounds lame, but it has definitely made my flexibility and balance 100 percent better on my skateboard. I do that and a lot of plyometric, biometrics, and surf. I train every other day of the week and skate for an hour everyday.
Ryan ShecklerBecause the question for me was always whether that shape we see in our lives was there from the beginning or whether these random events are only called a pattern after the fact. Because otherwise we are nothing.
Cormac McCarthyPaul's One Way Out is a fresh, intelligently arranged, and satisfyingly complete telling of the lengthy (and unlikely) history of the group that almost singlehandedly brought rock up to a level of jazz-like sophistication and virtuosity, introducing it as a medium worthy of the soloist's art. Oral histories can be tricky things: either penetrating, delivering information and backstories that get to the heart of how timeless music was made. Or too often, they lie flat on the page, a random retelling of repeated facts and reheated yarns. I'm happy to say that Paul's is in that first category.
Ashley KahnThere is no reason to assume that the universe has the slightest interest in intelligenceโor even in life. Both may be random accidental by-products of its operations like the beautiful patterns on a butterfly's wings. The insect would fly just as well without them.
Arthur C. ClarkeAny property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random. The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms. As for the victims, the government now has license to transfer property from those with fewer resources to those with more. The Founders cannot have intended this perverse result.
Sandra Day O'ConnorThe ability to see our lives as stories rather than unrelated, random events increases the possibility for significant and purposeful action.
Daniel TaylorThe objective of US authorities was to terminate their existence as peoples - not as random individuals. This is the very definition of modern genocide.
Roxanne Dunbar-OrtizStreets teemed with hell's wretched souls. New dead with their gadgets and old dead from antiquity. Demons roamed the avenues and alleyways, tormenting hapless damned at random with branding irons, flaming pitchforks, and razor-wire whips. -From the story Remember, Remember, Hell in November, in the anthology, Lawyers in Hell.
Larry Atchley Jr.Everybody always wants to meet musicians. You can go to any random bar around the world and be like, "I'm a musician," and they'll have something to say to you. It's kind of this weird passport where you can go around and as soon as you say you're a musician, you're welcome.
Patrick WatsonUNIX has a philosophy, it has 25 years of history behind it, and most importantly, it has a clean core. It strives for something - some kind of beauty. And that's really what struck me as a programmer. Operating systems that normal home users are used to, such as DOS and Windows, didn't have any way of life. Nobody tried to design Windows - it just grew in random directions without any kind of thought behind it. [...] I don't think Microsoft is evil in itself; I just think that they make really crappy operating systems.
Linus TorvaldsGive me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select - doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.
John B. WatsonA lot of people found themselves working at the Factory and some even in his bed as a result of random occurrences like your call. Most famous artists have never been all that interested in meeting strangers. That was not the case with Andy Warhol at all.
Bob ColacelloHow much of your life can you account for? My life is a collage of unaccounted for brush strokes; I am all randomโ.
John GuareIt would be as useless to perceive how things 'actually look' as it would be to watch the random dots on untuned television screens.
Marvin MinskyThe sun comes up just about as often as it goes down, in the long run, but this doesn't make its motion random.
Donald KnuthIs love supposed to last throughout all time, or is it like trains changing at random stops? If I loved her, how could I leave her? If I felt that way then, how come I don't feel anything now?
Jeff MelvoinIt is probably no exaggeration to suppose that in order to improve such an organ as the eye at all, it must be improved in ten different ways at once. And the improbability of any complex organ being produced and brought to perfection in any such way is an improbability of the same kind and degree as that of producing a poem or a mathematical demonstration by throwing letters at random on a table.
Joseph MurrayQuantum entanglement allows you to send information faster than light, which upset Einstein. But Einstein has the last laugh. The information you send on quantum entanglement is random, useless information. So Einsein still has the last laugh.
Michio KakuSecure web servers are the equivalent of heavy armoured cars. The problem is, they are being used to transfer rolls of coins and cheques written in crayon by people on park benches to merchants doing business in cardboard boxes from beneath highway bridges. Further, the roads are subject to random detours, anyone with a screwdriver can control the traffic lights, and there are no police.
Gene SpaffordWhat I had thought were signs of a broken educational system - the seemingly random placement of commas, the spastic syntax, the obnoxious overuse of quotation marks, the goofy misspelling of 'Jouralism' - were actually signs of the New Instantaneousness. 'Instant Jouralists' cannot be concerned with punctuation and grammar and spelling. That stuff just 'slows you down.' To be an 'Instant Jouralist,' you have to write as if you were being pursued by a cheetah across the Serengeti.
Nicholas G. CarrAt last the cold crept up my spine; at last it filled me from foot to head; at last I grew so chill and desolate that all thought and pain and awareness came to a standstill. I wasn't miserable anymore: I wasn't anything at all. I was a nothing-- a random configuration of molecules. If my heart still beat I didn't know it. I was aware of one thing only; next to the gaping fact called Death, all I knew was nothing, all I did meant nothing, all I felt conveyed nothing. This was no passing thought. It was a gnawing, palpable emptiness more real than the cold.
David James Duncan