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Unpredictable Quotes

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Unpredictable Quotes

“If you try to impose a rigid discipline while teaching a child or a chimp you are working against the boundless curiosity and need for relaxed play that make learning possible in the first place... learning cannot be controlled; it is out of control by design. Learning emerges spontaneously, it proceeds in an individualistic and unpredictable way, and it achieves its goal in its own good time. Once triggered, learning will not stop--unless it is hijacked by conditioning.”

IfsWayNeedsTryingFirstsChildrenPlayGoalTeachingAchieveDesignDisciplineCuriosityGood TimesControlledUnpredictableRelaxedConditioningBoundlessIndividualistic
Author:Roger Fouts
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“To better understand God we must first shatter our own idea of God - maybe even day after day. Maybe he's too great to stay compressed in the human mind. Maybe he splits it wide open; this is why pretentious intellectualism so often fails to comprehend the concept of God: it is only accepting of what it can explain while in the process finding higher sources offensive. What we may confidently assert is that faith is the opening that allows God, this unpredictable, unseen power, to travel in and out of the mind without all the pains of confusion.”

MindFirstsHumansMayIdeasPainProcessAcceptingFailingSourceHigherFindingsConceptsWideOpeningConfusionHuman MindSplitsOffensiveUnseenUnpredictablePretentiousIntellectualism
Author:Criss Jami
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“Evolving life must experience a vast range of possibilities, based on environmental histories so unpredictable that no realized route - the pathway to consciousness in the form of Homo sapiens or Little Green Men, for example - can be construed as a highway to heaven, but must be viewed as a tortuous track rutted with uncountable obstacles and festooned with innumerable alternative branches. Any reasonably precise repetition of our earthly route on another planet therefore becomes wildly improbable even in a trillion cases.”

MenLittlesFormHeavenConsciousnessCasesExamplePossibilityPlanetsGreenEnvironmentalTrackObstaclesAlternativesEvolveRangeBranchesRoutesPreciseRepetitionUnpredictableHighwaysPathwaysHomo SapiensImprobableEnvironmental History
Author:Stephen Jay Gould
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“Organisms [...] are directed and limited by their past. They must remain imperfect in their form and function, and to that extent unpredictable since they are not optimal machines. We cannot know their future with certainty, if only because a myriad of quirky functional shifts lie within the capacity of any feature, however well adapted to a present role.”

IfsKnowsWellsPastFormLyingRolesCapacityMachinesFunctionCertaintyFeaturesImperfectOrganismsUnpredictableAdaptedQuirkyOptimal
Book:Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History
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“The future will be less predictable, forecast rises will shrink, company lifetimes will shrink, new entrants will proliferate and it’s going to just get more unpredictable. If you thought financial crises came and went, just count on them – another economic collapse, it’s almost going to be like not news any more. But for startups this is great, because it’s a perpetual driver of disruption.”

IfsCompanyEconomicNewsCrisisLifetimeFinancialDriversCollapsePerpetualUnpredictableShrinksPredictableDisruptionFinancial CrisisForecastsEconomic Collapse
Author:Steve Jurvetson
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“As a philosophical problem, it comes down to a better way to engage with the passage of time; and I think we're getting close to one, because the imaginative loss of the future is becoming acute.The most effective political actors on the planet now are people who want to blow themselves up.These are people who really don't want to get out of the bed in the morning and face another unpredictable day.”

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Author:Bruce Sterling
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“Unlike every other product that is now manufactured for the table, wine exists in as many varieties as there are people who produce it. Variations in technique, climate, grape, soil and culture ensure that wine is, to the ordinary drinker, the most unpredictable of drinks, and to the connoisseur the most intricately informative, responding to its origins like a game of chess to its opening move.”

PeopleMovingCultureGamesProduceProductsDrinkOrdinaryTablesWineClimateTechniqueChessOpeningVarietySoilUnpredictableVariationGrapesRespondingDrinkersInformativeConnoisseur
Book:I Drink Therefore I Am: A Philosopher's Guide to Wine
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“We know from astronomy that the universe had a beginning, from physics that the future is both open and unpredictable, from geology and paleontology that the whole of life has been a process of change and transformation. From biology we know that our tissues are not impenetrable reservoirs of vital magic, but a stunning matrix of complex wonders, ultimately explicable in terms of biochemistry and molecular biology. With such knowledge we can see, perhaps for the first time, why a Creator would have allowed our species to be fashioned by the process of evolution.”

KnowsFirstsHas BeensWholeUniverseProcessTermWonderMagicEvolutionFirst TimeTransformationSpeciesComplexesCreatorPhysicsAstronomyBiologyUnpredictableTissuesGeologyStunningReservoirsBiochemistryPaleontologyMolecular BiologyProcess Of Change
Author:Kenneth R. Miller
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“When I took my oath of office to serve as your Governor, remember, I swore to steadfastly and doggedly guard the interests of this great state like a grizzly with cubs, as a mother naturally guards her own. Alaska, as a statewide family, we've got to fight for each other, not against and not let external, sensationalized distractions draw us off course. As an exciting year of unpredictable change begins, we, too, have our work cut out for us. And we're all in this together. Just like our musk ox, they circle up to protect their future when they are challenged. We've got to do the same.”

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Author:Sarah Palin
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“I believe C++ instills fear in programmers, fear that the interaction of some details causes unpredictable results. Its unmanageable complexity has spawned more fear-preventing tools than any other language, but the solution should have been to create and use a language that does not overload the whole goddamn human brain with irrelevant details.”

ShouldBelieveHumansDoeHas BeensWholeUseLanguageI BelieveCausesResultsBrainSolutionsToolsShould HaveDetailsComplexityInteractionUnpredictableIrrelevantShould Have BeenProgrammersPreventingHuman BrainInstillOverload
Author:Erik Naggum
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“Twentieth-century developments in science support a new animism. Developments in physics have led to a world of energetic events which seem to be self-moving and to behave in unpredictable ways. And recent studies in biology seem to demonstrate that bacteria and macromolecules have elemental forms of perception, memory, choice, and self-motion.”

WorldWaySelfSeemsMovingFormChoicesMemoriesSupportStudyCenturyEventsDevelopmentPerceptionPhysicsBehaveBiologyUnpredictableTwentieth CenturyEnergeticElementalsBacteriaAnimism
Book:God and Religion in the Postmodern World: Essays in Postmodern Theology
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“There is a future which is predictable, programmed, scheduled, foreseeable. But there is a future, l'avenir (to come) which refers to someone who comes whose arrival is totally unexpected. For me, that is the real future. That which is totally unpredictable. The Other who comes without my being able to anticipate their arrival. So if there is a real future, beyond the other known future, it is l'avenir in that it is the coming of the Other when I am completely unable to foresee their arrival.”

IfsRealAbleKnownUnexpectedUnpredictableAnticipatePredictableArrivals
Author:Jacques Derrida
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“I no longer believe the conservative message that children are naturally selfish and destructive creatures who need civilizing by hierarchies or painful controls. On the contrary, I believe that hierarchy and painful controls create destructive people. And I no longer believe the liberal message that children are blank slates on which society can write anything. On the contrary, I believe a unique core self is born into every human being; the result of millennia of environment and heredity combined in an unpredictable way that could never happen before or again.”

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Author:Gloria Steinem
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“Nothing is so unpredictable as a throw of the dice, and yet every man who plays often will at some time or other make a Venus-cast: now and then he indeed will make it twice and even thrice in succession. Are we going to be so feebleminded then as to aver that such a thing happened by the personal intervention of Venus rather than by pure luck?”

MenPlayHappenedPureLuckCastsEvery ManThings HappenGamblingNow And ThenUnpredictableInterventionSuccessionVenusDiceThrice
Author:Marcus Tullius Cicero
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“Are you in a universe which is ruled by natural laws and, therefore, is stable, firm, absolute - and knowable? Or are you in an incomprehensible chaos, a realm of inexplicable miracles, an unpredictable, unknowable flux, which your mind is impotent to grasp? The nature of your actions - and of your ambition - will be different, according to which set of answers you come to accept.”

MindDifferentActionLawReligionUniverseNaturalAnswersAcceptingAmbitionMiracleAbsolutesChaosFirmRealmsStableUnpredictableNatural LawInexplicableFlux
Book:Philosophy: Who Needs It
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“He should have known better because, early in his learnings under his brother Mahmoud, he had discovered that long human words (the longer the better) were easy, unmistakable, and rarely changed their meanings, but short words were slippery, unpredictable changing their meanings without any pattern. Or so he seemed to grok. Short human words were never like a short Martian word - such as grok which forever meant exactly the same thing. Short human words were like trying to lift water with a knife. And this had been a very short word.”

ShouldTryingHumansLongReligionEasyWaterKnownForeverChangedBrotherShould HavePatternsLiftsKnivesUnpredictableSlipperyMartiansShould Have KnownShort WordsShould Have Known Better
Author:Robert A. Heinlein
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“In dreams you can have the feeling that you've had this dream before, that you have this dream over and over again, and you know that it's really nothing that simple. You know that there's a whole underground system that you call 'dreams,' having nothing better to call them, and that this system is not like roads or tunnels but more like a live body network, all coiling and stretching, unpredictable but finally familiar - where you are now, where you've always been.”

KnowsWholeFeelingsDreamBodySimpleFamiliarWhere You AreUnpredictableTunnelsStretching
Book:Friend of my youth: stories
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“We do not need to minimize the poverty of the ghetto or the suffering inflicted by whites on blacks in order to see that the increasingly dangerous and unpredictable conditions of middle-class life have given rise to similar strategies for survival. Indeed the attraction of black culture for disaffected whites suggests that black culture now speaks to a general condition.”

NeedsSufferingOrderCultureSpeakGivenBlackClassPovertyMiddleConditionsDangerousSurvivalStrategyAttractionMiddle ClassUnpredictableGhettoBlack CultureMiddle Class Life
Book:The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations
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