Popular quotes about Random! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 9
It [moviemaking] is like a dream. When you're dreaming, you make some very strange connections between some random stuff and random people.
Quentin DupieuxEvery rock or molotov cocktail thrown should make a very obvious political point. Random violence produces random propaganda results. Why waste even a rock?
Abbie HoffmanRousseau had it backwards. We are NOT born free. We are born in the chains of the random and the reflexive, and are ignorant and unreasonable by simple nature. We must learn to be free, to organize the random and detect the reflexive, to acquire the knowledge of particulars and the powers of reason. The examined life is impossible if we cannot examine, order, classify, define, distinguish, always in minute particulars.
Richard MitchellThe falling flakes were random and without purpose; the snow was drunker than she was.
Chuck KlostermanYou 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 AlbomMy favourite road sign is 'Falling Rocks'. What exactly am I supposed to do with that information? They may as well have a sign saying "Random accidents ahead", "Life's a lottery, Be lucky."
Jimmy CarrI like making books but I'm not sure exactly what I'm doing. Perhaps I just try to arrange a bunch of seemingly random drawings into something that makes a vague narrative sense. Sometimes it sort of makes sense, sometimes it doesn't.
David ShrigleyTo make a poem, take one newspaper, one pair of scissors, snip the words one by one and put them in a bag. Shake gently, draw them out at random, and copy them conscientiously... DADA est mort. DADA est idiot. Vive DADA!
Tristan TzaraIt seems to be really trendy to get excited about a random-ass radio song. Which, I like radio songs, don't get me wrong. But I'm just confused at which ones seem to be heralded as some sort of genius-like concoction. It doesn't totally make sense to me.
Ed DrosteYou have to be careful on the deck, because of the "hatches," which are holes placed around a sailboat at random to increase the insurance rates.
Dave BarryThe likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate matter is 1 to a number with 40,000 noughts after it (1040,000).... It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution. There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor any other, and if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence.
Fred HoyleJust throw me in a time machine, hit random, and wherever I land would be great... Just being thrown into a different time really fascinates me.
Beau MirchoffI have all these weird fantasies. Going coast-to-coast on my motorcycle and having random barbecues all over America. No show, no nothing.
Dave ChappelleI don't analyze too much, because then I'll question, 'Why do I write down all of these random little phrases?'
Sue TompkinsWhether or not he came to believe it - so many people, when they have a mission, come to believe something in a way that may have started out as a slogan. You know, L. Ron Hubbard, not to make a random comparison, started Scientology as a scam.
Alex GibneyI 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 SteinThings work well when a group of people know each other, and things break down when it's a bunch of random people interacting.
Jimmy WalesYou 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 NolanImagine 1050 blind persons each with a scrambled Rubik's cube, and try to conceive of the chance of them all simultaneously arriving at the solved form. You then have a chance of arriving by random shuffling, of just one of the many biopolymers on which life depends. The notion that not only the biopolymers but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order.
Fred HoyleThe 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 like to do chill things on dates. I think it would be fun to go to the zoo. I know it's really weird and random, but I love animals. It'd be like a day of doing silly things, while enjoying nature.
Ashlee SimpsonEvery day, do something selfless for someone else that takes under five minutes. The essence of this thing you do should be that it makes a big difference to the person receiving the gift. Usually these favors take the form of an introduction, reference, feedback, or broadcast on social media. Do something that's not for yourself, every single day. Expect nothing in return. Over time, these random acts of kindness will really add up.
Adam RifkinThe visa lottery system poses a national security threat. Under the program, each successful applicant is chosen at random and given the status of permanent resident based on pure luck.
Bob GoodlatteSome people have an inner child that speaks to them. I have an inner old man who just yells random [stuff] at me all day.
Rob CantrellSilicon 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 SuarezThere 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 ConnollyI know that a Christmas tree farm in Pennsylvania is about the most random place for a country singer to come from, but I had an awesome childhood.
Taylor SwiftBecause 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 McCarthyDetroit was kind of a random thing where it was like a chance to be in a rock 'n' roll movie.
Edward FurlongDon't let some random comment that you wouldn't have even thought about overshadow something important that you were actually trying to say.
LordeOut 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 TutuPhillip is a repository of random snatches of film dialogue and song lyrics. To make room for all of it in his brain, he apparently cleared out all the areas where things like reason and common sense are stored.
Jonathan TropperThe only sense we still respect is eyesight, probably because it is so closely attached to the brain. Go into any American house at random, you will find something - a plastic flower, false tiles, some imitation something - something which can be appreciated as material only if apprehended by eyesight alone. Don't we go sightseeing in cars, thinking we can experience a landscape by looking at it through glass?
Galway KinnellGame shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.
Chuck PalahniukThe essence of Darwinism lies in its claim that natural selection creates the fit. Variation is ubiquitous and random in direction. It supplies raw material only. Natural selection directs the course of evolutionary change.
Stephen Jay GouldHey, don't knock Judy Blume. Without her, my younger self would never have been able to decode the random acts of madness perpetrated by the fascinating creature known as the teenage girl.
Ken MarinoA 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 YoungerAt the risk of sounding pedestrian, I'll be completely honest: the first thing I do in the morning is check Google News, partially because it seems sort of random and unbiased and partially because I tend to stay in hotels that don't necessarily have the fastest Internet connections.
MobyIn spite of all evidence that life is discontinuous, a valley of rifts, and that random chance plays a great part in our fates, we go on believing in the continuity of things, in causation and meaning. But we live on a broken mirror, and fresh cracks appear in its surface every day.
Salman RushdieListen to your hunches, pay attention to your intuition, do not dismiss your random thoughts, inspirations or ideas.... They could be giving you the best advice you ever had.
Neale Donald WalschThe normal curve is a distribution most appropriate to chance and random activity. Education is a purposeful activity and we seek to have students learn what we would teach. Therefore, if we are effective, the distribution of grades will be anything but a normal curve. In fact, a normal curve is evidence of our failure to teach.
Benjamin BloomLike fanning through a deck of cards, my mind flashes on the thousand chances, trivial to profound, that converged to re-create this place. Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere; I would be different. Where did the expression "a place in the sun" first come from? My rational thought process cling always to the idea of free will, random event; my blood, however, streams easily along a current of fate.
Frances MayesThe positive evidence for Darwinism is confined to small-scale evolutionary changes like insects developing insecticide resistance....Evidence like that for insecticide resistance confirms the Darwinian selection mechanism for small-scale changes, but hardly warrants the grand extrapolation that Darwinists want. It is a huge leap going from insects developing insecticide resistance via the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection and random variation to the very emergence of insects in the first place by that same mechanism.
William A. Dembski