Quotessence
Home / Topics / Contingency Quotes

Contingency Quotes

Browse 105 quotes about Contingency.

Related topics

IfsWorldPlansContingency PlansHumansMenWay

Contingency Quotes

“There is no evolutionary pressure to create minds capable of forming sciences; it just happened. Evolutionary pressure has not led to higher rates of reproduction for people capable of solving scientific problems or creating new scientific ideas. So if, in fact, the science-forming capacities evolved for other reasons, it would not be too surprising if those particular structures that have developed proved to be rather special in their nature, reflecting the contingencies of their evolution or the working of physical law.”

PeopleIfsMindIdeasReasonFactsProblemLawHappenedSpecialParticularEvolutionHigherCreatingCapableCapacityPressureStructureRateSurprisingReflectingReproductionContingency
Author:Noam Chomsky
Create image

“In the army we are drilled into execution and then supervision, to make sure everything goes the way you planned it. But there is another thing that we do in the military, that I think perhaps isn't done enough in corporate life: As soon as you have made that decision, you start on the contingency planning. Because there is, as we like to say, a thinking, breathing enemy out there, who is not going to let you do just what you want.”

ThinkingWayWantMadeDoneEnoughDecisionEnemyMilitaryArmyWhat You WantPlanningBreathingCorporateExecutionSupervisionContingency
Author:Colin Powell
Create image

“The guarantee of safety in a battering relationship can never be based upon a promise from the perpetrator, no matter how heartfelt. Rather, it must be based upon the self-protective capability of the victim. Until the victim has developed a detailed and realistic contingency plan and has demonstrated her ability to carry it out, she remains in danger of repeated abuse.”

SelfMatterAbilityPlansDangerPromiseAbuseSafetyVictimRemainsGuaranteesRealisticCapabilityProtectiveHeartfeltPerpetratorsContingencyVictimizationBatteringBattered WomenContingency Plans
Author:Judith Lewis Herman
Create image

“The vanity of existence is revealed in the whole form existence assumes: in the infiniteness of time and space contrasted with the finiteness of the individual in both; in the fleeting present as the sole form in which actuality exists; in the contingency and relativity of all things; in continual becoming without being; in continual desire without satisfaction; in the continual frustration of striving of which life consists. . . Time is that by virtue of which everything becomes nothingness in our hands and loses all real value.”

RealWholeHandsFormDesireValuesIndividualLosesSpaceExistenceVirtueBecomingAll ThingsAssumingStriveSatisfactionVanityFrustrationSoleNothingnessTime And SpaceFleetingRelativityActualityReal ValueContingency
Author:Arthur Schopenhauer
Create image

“what are you looking for? There is no Truth. There's only action, action obeying a million different impulses, ephemeral action, action subjected to every possible and imaginable contingency and contradiction, Life. Life is crime, theft, jealousy, hunger, lies, disgust,stupidity, sickness, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, piles of corpses. what can you do about it, my poor friend?”

DifferentActionLife IsLyingPoorMillionsCrimeHungerStupidityImpulseJealousySicknessContradictionDisgustingCorpsesTheftNihilismEarthquakesEphemeralObeyingVolcanoesUntruthContingencyEruptionVolcanic Eruptions
Author:Blaise Cendrars
Create image

“The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed - where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.”

PeopleMaySeemsGovernmentTodayLostMistakeSilenceRightsArmsCircumstancesWeaponsGunCourtRefuseLawyerProtestAmendmentsGun ControlLaw EnforcementProvisionOpposingSecond AmendmentImprobableDecreeRight To Bear ArmsBearing ArmsUnpreparedPro GunContingencyDoomsdayAnti GunReelection
Author:Alex Kozinski
Create image

“Another way to be prepared is to think negatively. Yes, I'm a great optimist. but, when trying to make a decision, I often think of the worst case scenario. I call it 'the eaten by wolves factor.' If I do something, what's the most terrible thing that could happen? Would I be eaten by wolves? One thing that makes it possible to be an optimist, is if you have a contingency plan for when all hell breaks loose. There are a lot of things I don't worry about, because I have a plan in place if they do.”

IfsThinkingWayTryingHappensDecisionAttitudeBreakCasesWorryHellPlansOne ThingWorstTerriblePreparedFactorsOptimisticBe PreparedOptimistAnother WayTerrible ThingsScenariosContingencyWorst Case ScenarioContingency Plans
Book:The last lecture
Create image

“But [in bureaucracies], too, decision making takes place in a world full of unceratinties. Any actual system of information processing, planning and control will never be optimal but merely practical, applying rote responses to recurrent problems and employing a variety of contingency tactics to deal with unforeseen events.”

WorldProblemDecisionDealsEventsInformationResponsePlanningPracticalsVarietyDecision MakingBureaucracyTacticsProcessingEmployingContingencyOptimalUnforeseenInformation Processing
Book:A thousand years of nonlinear history
Create image

“Play is a subset of voluntary behaviour involving a selective mechanism which reverses the usual contingencies of power so as to permit the subject a controllable and dialectical simulation of the moderately unmastered arousals and regulations of everyday life, in a way that is alternatively vivifying and euphoric.”

WayPlaySubjectsEverydayPermitUsualMechanismRegulationReverseBehaviourEveryday LifeInvolvingSelectiveSimulationContingencyArousalEuphoric
Author:Brian Sutton-Smith
Create image

“The skin is a variety of contingency: in it, through it, with it, the world and my body touch each other, the feeling and the felt, it defines their common edge. Contingency means common tangency: in it the world and the body intersect and caress each other. I do not wish to call the place in which I live a medium, I prefer to say that things mingle with each other and that I am no exception to that. I mix with the world which mixes with me. Skin intervenes between several things in the world and makes them mingle.”

WorldMeanFeelingsBodyWishFeltCommonSkinsEdgesMediumsVarietyExceptionCaressContingency
Author:Michel Serres
Create image

“The new goddess contingency could not be erected until the God of heaven was utterly despoiled of his dominion over the sons of men, and in the room thereof a home-bred idol of self-sufficiency set up, and the world persuaded to worship it. But that the building climb no higher, let all men observe how the word of God overthrows this babylonian tower.”

MenWorldSelfHomeHeavenRoomsBuildingSonHigherWorshipClimbsWord Of GodIdolsGoddessTowersDominionSelf SufficiencySufficiencyContingency
Book:The works ...
Create image

“Fiction, with its preference for what is small and might elsewhere seem irrelevant; its facility for smuggling us into another skin and allowing us to live a new life there; its painstaking devotion to what without it might go unnoticed and unseen; its respect for contingency, and the unlikely and odd; its willingness to expose itself to moments of low, almost animal being and make them nobly illuminating, can deliver truths we might not otherwise stumble on.”

MomentsSeemsMightAnimalFictionLowsSkinsDevotionOddWillingnessAllowingElsewhereUnseenIrrelevantNew LifePreferenceUnlikelyFacilityUnnoticedIlluminatingContingencySmuggling
Book:The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World
Create image

“McEwan's Atonement…truly dazzles, proving to be as much about the art and morality of writing as it is about the past…. The middle section of Atonement, the two vividly realized set pieces of Robbie's trek to the Channel and Briony's experiences with the wounded evacuees of Dunkirk, would alone have made an outstanding novel…. There is wonderful writing throughout as McEwan weaves his many themes — the accidents of contingency, the sins of absent fathers, class oppression — into his narrative, and in a magical love scene.”

WritingArtMadeTwoPastFatherSinClassNovelPiecesWonderfulMiddleMoralitySceneProveAccidentsOppressionNarrativeThemeWoundedSectionsAbsentOutstandingAtonementDazzleContingencyDunkirk
Author:Noah Richler
Create image

“McIntosh is persuasive in his arguments that the scientific facts of evolution cannot stand alone ... science shows that historical evolution, whatever its contingencies, is itself on a trajectory of values development. McIntosh has well-researched his sources and integrated them with seminal insight.”

WellsFactsShowsValuesSourceDevelopmentEvolutionArgumentHistoricalInsightIntegratedStand AlonePersuasiveTrajectoryContingencyScientific Facts
Author:Holmes Rolston III
Create image

“So-called real life has only once interfered with me, and it had been a far cry from what the words, lines, books had prepared me for. Fate had to do with blind seers, oracles, choruses announcing death, not with panting next to the refrigerator, fumbling with condoms, waiting in a Honda parked round the corner and surreptitious encounters in a Lisbon hotel. Only the written word exists, everything one must do oneself is without form, subject to contingency without rhyme or reason. It takes too long. And if it ends badly the metre isn't right, and there's no way to cross things out.”

IfsWayLongBookRealEndsReasonFormNextWaitingLinesFateWrittenSubjectsCryCrossesBlindPreparedRoundsOneselfCornersReal LifeEncountersHotelRhymeChorusRefrigeratorsWritten WordCondomOraclesSeersContingencyAnnouncingHonda
Author:Cees Nooteboom
Create image

“A writer's work has to take account of many rhythms: Vulcan's and Mercury's, a message of urgency obtained by dint of patient and meticulous adjustments and an intuition so instantaneous that, when formulated, it acquires the finality of something that could never have been otherwise. But it is also the rhythm of time that passes with no other aim than to let feelings and thoughts settle down, mature, and shed all impatience or ephemeral contingency.”

Has BeensFeelingsMessagesAccountsAimPatientIntuitionRhythmSettlingAcquireMatureShedImpatienceAdjustmentUrgencyEphemeralSettling DownMercuryFinalityContingencyInstantaneousMeticulous
Book:Six Memos for the Next Millennium
Create image

“The denial of "self" challenges only the notion of a static self independent of body and mind-not the ordinary sense of ourself as a person distinct from everyone else. The notion of a static self is the primary obstruction to the realization of our unique potential as an individual being. By dissolving this fiction through a centered vision of the transiency, ambiguity, and contingency of experience, we are freed to create ourself anew.”

MindPersonsSelfBodyIndividualChallengesFictionVisionPracticeUniqueOrdinaryIndependentNotionRealizationPrimariesDenialMind And BodyAmbiguityStaticObstructionContingencyDissolving
Author:Stephen Batchelor
Create image

“When it comes to preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, I will take no options off the table. ... That includes all elements of American power: a political effort aimed at isolating Iran, a diplomatic effort to sustain our coalition and ensure that the Iranian program is monitored, an economic effort that imposes crippling sanctions and, yes, a military effort to be prepared for any contingency.”

PoliticalEffortEconomicMilitaryElementsWeaponsProgramTablesPreparedNuclearIranNuclear WeaponsBe PreparedSanctionsPreventingCoalitionsIranianDiplomaticObtainingContingencyAmerican Power
Author:Barack Obama
Create image

“It may safely be received as an axiom in our political system, that the state governments will in all possible contingencies afford complete security against invasions of the public liberty by the national authority.”

MayStatesGovernmentPoliticalLibertySecurityAuthorityInvasionPolitical SystemsAxiomsState GovernmentContingency
Book:The Federalist Papers and the Constitution of the United States: The Principles of the American Government
Create image

“Life, as the most ancient of all metaphors insists, is a journey; and the travel book, in its deceptive simulation of the journey's fits and starts, rehearses life's own fragmentation. More even than the novel, it embraces the contingency of things.”

BookNovelJourneyFitTravelEmbraceAncientMetaphorDeceptiveSimulationContingencyFragmentationTravel Books
Book:For love & money: writing, reading, travelling, 1969-1987
Create image