Contingency quotes:

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It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency. -- Penelope Lively
Chance doesn't mean meaningless randomness, but historical contingency. This happens rather than that, and that's the way that novelty, new things, come about. -- John Polkinghorne
New terms used like, 'overseas contingency operation' instead of the word 'war' - that reflects a worldview that is out of touch with the enemy that we face. We can't spin our way out of this threat. -- Sarah Palin
We have contingency plans for war, but none for peace. -- Theodore C. Sorensen
And even, if circumstances required, a contingency plan for his contingency plan's contingency plan. -- Frank Beddor
The world changed from having the determinism of a clock to having the contingency of a pinball machine. -- Heinz R. Pagels
The war on terror, rebranded under Obama as the "Overseas Contingency Operation," has morphed into war on democracy. -- Henry Giroux
To ... not prepare is the greatest of crimes; to be prepared beforehand for any contingency is the greatest of virtues. -- Sun Tzu
Luck enters into every contingency. You are a fool if you forget it -- and a greater fool if you count upon it. -- Phyllis Bottome
Poetry is an act of distillation. It takes contingency samples, is selective. It telescopes time. It focuses what most often floods past us in a polite blur. -- Diane Ackerman
The same contingencies of time and space that force a statesman or soldier to make decisions, impel the historian, though with less urgency, to make up his mind. -- Samuel Eliot Morison
One thing that I am sure of, and which I can answer truthfully, is that whatever the contingencies that may arise here, wherever I am there will be no Communism. -- Francisco Franco
Books, like lives, are always unfinished even when they end, for to write is to struggle with contingency, to impose a certain false order upon the endless, and endlessly frustrating, nature of thought. -- Mark Kingwell
A good portfolio is more than a long list of good stocks and bonds. It is a balanced whole, providing the investor with protections and opportunities with respect to a wide range of contingencies. -- Harry Markowitz
There are contingency plans in the NATO doctrine to fire a nuclear weapon for demonstrative purposes, to demonstrate to the other side that they are exceeding the limits of toleration in the conventional area. -- Alexander Haig
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. -- Alexander Hamilton
The good lawyer is not the man who has an eye to every side and angle of contingency, and qualifies all his qualifications, but who throws himself on your part so heartily, that he can get you out of a scrape. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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. -- Jonathan Raban
By no amount of reasoning can we altogether eliminate all contingency from our world. Moreover, pure speculation alone will not enable us to get a determinate picture of the existing world. We must eliminate some of the conflicting possibilities, and this can be brought about only by experiment and observation. -- Morris Raphael Cohen
In brief, nationalism is a theory of political legitimacy, which requires the ethnic boundaries should not be cut across political ones, and, in particular, that ethnic boundaries within a given state a contingency already formally excluded by the principle in its general formulation should not separate the power holders from the rest. -- Ernest Gellner
I believe that a person should take an affirmative outlook. There are always problems in life, old and new, uncertainties, and unexpected contingencies. The optimal way to deal with this is not to give up in despair, but to move ahead using the best intelligence and resources that we have to overcome adversity. -- Paul Kurtz
A president must be on the job 24/7, ready for any contingency, any crisis, anywhere, anytime. -- Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo
The world changed from having the determinism of a clock to having the contingency of a pinball machine. -- Heinz R. Pagels
When you see John Boehner crying, believe you me, it's because he cannot control, uh, that wild contingency called the Tea Party. -- Gwen Moore
There is certainly a strong game development community in Texas, centered around Austin, with a significant additional contingency coming over from Dallas. -- Jennifer Pahlka
That nature does not care, one way or the other, is the true abyss. That only man cares, in his finitude facing nothing but death, alone with his contingency and the objective meaninglessness of his projecting meanings, is a truly unprecedented situation. -- Hans Jonas
I knew it to be very doubtful whether the Cabinet, Parliament, and the country would take this view on the outbreak of war, and through the whole of this week I had in view the probable contingency that we should not decide at the critical moment to support France. -- Edward Grey
Freedom is the recognition of contingency. -- Richard Rorty
We are a fluke of nature, a quirk of evolution, a glorious contingency. -- Michael Shermer
[A] power equal to every possible contingency must exist somewhere in the government . . . -- Alexander Hamilton
There is nearly always uh, a process of wanting contingency plans made in the military. -- McGeorge Bundy
He is always becoming, and if it were not for the contingency of death, he would never end. -- Jean-Paul Sartre
You can't control every contingency. You have to accept that. Let it scare you. Trust that it'll be okay anyway. -- Rick Riordan
Presidents and Lyndon Johnson was really no exception, very rapidly learned the difference between a contingency plan and an authorized act. -- McGeorge Bundy
One thing that makes it possible to be an optimist is if you have a contingency plan for when all hell breaks loose. -- Randy Pausch
Mercy is a contingency plan, devised by the guilty in the eventuality that they are caught. Justice is the domain of the just. - Richard Rahl -- Terry Goodkind
Feminism has exceeded its proper mission of seeking political equality for women and has ended by rejecting contingency, that is, human limitation by nature or fate. -- Camille Paglia
Humans are wired to feel uncomfortable with uncertainty and contingency, and so we gravitate to a position after a short time even if we have no new information. -- Charles Hugh Smith
[Y]ou will understand the game behind the curtain too well not to perceive the old trick of turning every contingency into a resource for accumulating force in the government. -- James Madison
You can get far in North America with laconic grunts. "Huh," "hun," and "hi!" in their various modulations, together with "sure," "guess so," "that so?" and "nuts!" will meet almost any contingency. -- Ian Fleming
I mean, the radical contingency that is - that exists and the fact that I'm going into the streets and finding random strangers any given day - who's in these streets that day? -- Kehinde Wiley
Once the dollar begins to collapse beneath the weight of all this new deficit spending, accumulation of contingency liabilities and the socialization of our economy, commodity prices and interest rates will head skyward. -- Peter Schiff
God foreknows nothing by contingency, but that He foresees, purposes, and does all things according to His immutable, eternal, and infallible will. By this thunderbolt, "Free-will" is thrown prostrate, and utterly dashed to pieces. -- Martin Luther

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