Popular quotes about Random! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 54
A random sequence is one that cannot be algorithmically compressed : the shortest description of a random sequence is simply the sequence itself.
Gregory ChaitinIn memory of Emily we would like everyone to go out and do random acts of kindness, random acts of love to your friends or your neighbors or your fellow students because there is no way to make sense of this. It's what Emily would have wanted.
Luis GonzalezThe lesson has already been learned with alcohol prohibition. We tried to engineer an alcohol-free society and ended up with huge criminal enterprises, government corruption, children lured into organized crime and random violence that took the lives of countless innocent people.
Kurt SchmokeThere are no random acts...We are all connected...You can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind.
Mitch AlbomYou say you should have died instead of me. But during my time on earth, people died instead of me, too. It happens every day. When lightning strikes a minute after you are gone, or an airplane crashes that you might have been on. When your colleague falls ill and you do not. We think such things are random. But there is a balance to it all. One withers, another grows. Birth and death are part of a whole.
Mitch AlbomSometimes my brain goes on CD shuffle. You know, you put a bunch of CD's on and hit play and random things come out.
Bette MidlerBeauty is excrescence, superabundance, random ebulience, and sheer delightful waste to be enjoyed in its own right.
Donald C. PeattieThe man without a purpose is a man who drifts at the mercy of random feelings or unidentified urges and is capable of any evil, because he is totally out of control of his own life. In order to be in control of your life, you have to have a purpose-a productive purpose.
Ayn RandPick 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 FriedmanIt's not a random chance that we have Alanis Morissette. She didn't evolve out of a null and void. She came from a former template. She borrowed styles and sounds from a very limited set of other artists.
Greg GraffinAnyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin.
John von NeumannBasketball is an intricate, high-speed game filled with split-second, spontaneous decisions. But that spontaneity is possible only when everyone first engages in hours of highly repetitive and structured practice--perfecting their shooting, dribbling, and passing and running plays over and over again--and agrees to play a carefully defined role on the court. This is the critical lesson of improve, too, and it is also a key to understanding a puzzle of Millennium Challenge: spontaneity isn't random.
Malcolm GladwellIs it really credible that random processes could have constructed a reality...which excels in every sense anything produced by the intelligence of man?
Michael DentonFor me the problem of induction is a problem about the world: a problem of how we, as we are now (by our present scientific lights), in a world we never made, should stand better than random, or coin-tossing chances changes of coming out right when we predict by inductions. . . .
Willard Van Orman QuineAlthough I insist that God has always had the power to intervene directly in nature to create new forms, I am willing to be per-suaded that He chose not to do so and instead employed secondary natural causes like random mutation and natural selection.
Phillip E. JohnsonYou know, we certainly have a great budget on the show, but the expansions to world of the show really arise because, and this is kind of the idea of the premise of the show, where is each week you're kind of meeting . . . It's random access.
Jonathan NolanThe Federal Building's large Ceremonial Courtroom, reserved for show trials, is veneered in executive teak. Bench, counsel tables, jury boxes, entrances, and exits -- all are as formally arranged as an Elizabethan stage. Only the drama is shapeless, at least to those of us who have never seen a trial before. We see only random movements, sequences, comings and goings, no form or agenda apparent. To us the action is less like watching a play than watching an aquarium.
Shana AlexanderI admire addicts. In a world where everybody is waiting for some blind, random disaster or some sudden disease, the addict has the comfort of knowing what will most likely wait for him down the road. He's taken some control over his ultimate fate, and his addiction keeps the cause of his death from being a total surprise.
Chuck PalahniukI don't want to be one of those people that's constantly promoting myself on Twitter. I think the fun thing about Twitter is being able to share all the little random things that happen in my life.
Bridgit MendlerSome people have a mistaken idea that all thoughts disappear through meditation and we enter a state of blankness. There certainly are times of great tranquility when concentration is strong and we have few, if any, thoughts. But other times, we can be flooded with memories, plans or random thinking. It's important not to blame yourself.
Sharon SalzbergI brought Sammy inside and put him to bed. Said his prayer with him. โโNow I lay me down to sleepโฆโโ To me, just random noise. Gibberish. I wasnโt sure exactly what it was, but I felt that, when it came to God, there was a broken promise in there somewhere.
Rick YanceyWe are all far less rational in our decision-making than standard economic theory assumes. Our irrational behaviors are neither random nor senseless: they are systematic and predictable. We all make the same types of mistakes over and over, because of the basic wiring of our brains.
Dan ArielyI remember going with my mom to a random garage sale as a kid and thinking what a cool treasure hunt that whole world was. Only to transition as an adult to think, 'What a gross place that really is.'
Will FerrellThere are people whose eyes you must avoid, whose attention you must not draw to yourself. They are strange, parasitic creatures, lost souls seeking to stretch across the abyss and make fatal contact with the warm, constant flow of humanity. They live in pain, and exist only to visit that pain on others. A random glance, the momentary lingering of a look, is enough to give them the excuse that they seek. Sometimes, it is better to keep your eyes on the gutter for the fear that, by looking up, you might catch a glimpse of them, black shapes against the sun, and be blinded forever.
John ConnollyThe neatest part of this book I'm working on - to me - are the pictures that show the process... Because photographers... think things through and... it isn't luck, and it isn't random and it isn't accidental. It isn't.
Sam AbellThe whole thing of singing on my own has been accidental and random. I sang a huge amount as a kid, and I was a boy soprano. I didn't do that much classical music; I did a little bit. I had a lovely voice. And then when my voice dropped, I didn't worry about it consciously because I wasn't that invested in my singing at the time.
Sam AmidonWe always knew how to honor fallen soldiers. They were killed for our sake, they went out on our mission. But how are we to mourn a random man killed in a terrorist attack while sitting in a cafe? How do you mourn a housewife who got on a bus and never returned?
A. B. YehoshuaPaul'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 KahnConsider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, "memex" will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.
Vannevar BushThe past is our ultimate privacy; we pile it up, year by year, decade by decade, it stows itself away, with its perverse random recall system.
Penelope LivelyThe Internet has no such organization - files are made available at random locations. To search through this chaos, we need smart tools, programs that find resources for us.
Clifford StollOut of the cacophony of random suffering and chaos that can mark human life, the life artist sees or creates a symphony of meaning and order. A life of wholeness does not depend on what we experience. Wholeness depends on how we experience our lives.
Desmond TutuChance. Stupid, dumb, blind chance. Just a part of the strange mechanism of the world, with its fits and coughs and starts and random collisions.
Lauren OliverThere 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. ClarkeDeep inside I feel that this world we live in is really a big, huge, monumental symphonic orchestra. I believe that in its primordial form all of creation is sound and that it's not just random sound, that it's music. You've heard the expression, music of the spheres? Well, that's a very literal phrase. In the Gospels, we read, "And the Lord God made man from the dust of the earth and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul." That 'breath of life' to me is the music of life and it permeates every fiber of creation.
Michael JacksonThere should be a law that no ordinary newspaper should be allowed to write about art. The harm they do by their foolish and random writing it would be impossible to overestimate--not to the artist but to the public.... Without them we would judge a man simply by his work; but at present the newspapers are trying hard to induce the public to judge a sculptor, for instance, never by his statues but by the way he treats his wife; a painter by the amount of his income and a poet by the colour of his necktie.
Oscar WildeOnly a dreamer or a fool would pick a stock at random and expect it to take off like a space ship from its launching pad. Certainly this has happened - about as often as a dime-store clerk has become a Hollywood star or a boy born in a log cabin has been elected President of the United States - just often enough, that is, to keep alive the Great American Dream.
Catherine Crook de CampI believe in God. It makes no sense to me to assume that the Universe and our existence is just a cosmic accident, that life emerged due to random physical processes in an environment which simply happened to have the right properties. As a Christian I begin to comprehend what life is all about through belief in a Creator, some of whose nature was revealed by a man born about 2000 years ago.
Antony HewishYou learn in life that a lot of things are the result of effort, but some things, in terms of scale, are random.
Mark CubanA large library is apt to distract rather than to instruct the learner; it is much better to be confined to a few authors than to wander at random over many.
Seneca the YoungerHe wanted to live life in such a way that if a photograph were taken at random, it would be a cool photograph.
David NichollsPeople understand contests. You take a bunch of kids throwing rocks at random and people look askance, but if you go and hold a rock-throwing contest - people understand that.
Don MurrayThere is nothing glamorous or romantic about war. It's mostly about random pointless death and misery.
Jon KrakauerI didn't like school. I was pretty much daydreaming all the time. I would be in the back of the class writing down random stories and stuff that would have nothing to do with school. I only lasted two years in high school before I moved out to L.A.
Charlie McDermottUnless, of course, there's no such thing as chance;...in which case, we should either-optimistically-get up and cheer, because if everything is planned in advance, then we all have a meaning and are spared the terror of knowing ourselves to be random, without a why; or else, of course, we might-as pessimists-give up right here and now, understanding the futility of thought decision action, since nothing we think makes any difference anyway, things will be as they will. Where, then, is optimism? In fate or in chaos?
Salman RushdieRandom Roles? Oh, I saw Virginia Madsen do this the other day! You see? I'm paying attention!
Rob Lowe