Likelihood Quotes

The likelihood of one individual being right increases in direct proportion to the intensity to which others are trying to prove him wrong.

The most significant learning occurs when emotions are integrated with instruction because all body systems are united. The Arts are strongly linked to emotions, enhancing the likelihood that students will remember something.

When someone repeatedly insists that something isn't true, it increases the likelihood that it is.

Each time you indulge in the emotion of anger or the behavior of yelling at a loved one, you reinforce the neural connection and increase the likelihood that you'll do it again.

If we define risk as 'the likelihood of an irreversible negative outcome,' inaction is the greatest risk of all.

[We need to ] select immigrants based on their likelihood of success in U.S. society and their ability to be financially self- sufficient.

I will consider my time in the Senate a failure if we don't pass some meaningful legislation to reduce the likelihood that Sandy Hook ever happens again.

When I turned 36 I realised - the likelihood is that in four years time I'll be 40.

[Edward Snoden] has said many times that he's willing to come back and face trial if he can be guaranteed a fair trial, but the likelihood of that is so slim.

There is no point in retaining a brand equity if it has no traction with consumers, or has no likelihood of doing so.

The worst possible thing for any of us - no matter what our temptations, no matter what our mortal inclinations may be - is to become fixated with them, to dwell on them. When we do that, not only do we deny the other things that comprise us, but experience teaches that there will be an increased likelihood that eventually we will simply succumb to the inclination.

After years spent in Washington, I have become more aware than ever of the government's ineptness and the likelihood of its making mistakes. I no longer trust the U.S. government to invoke and carry out a death sentence under any conditions.

Any evaluation which implies rightness or wrongness is a tragic, suicidal expression of an unmet need. Tragic, first because it decreases our likelihood of getting our need met! Even if we think it. And secondly, because it increases the likelihood of violence. That's why I'm suggesting any evaluation which implies rightness or wrongness is a tragic, suicidal expression of an unmet need. Say the need! Learn a need-consciousness.

Any food product that feels compelled to tell you it’s natural in all likelihood is not.

Both we and the Soviets face the common threat of nuclear destruction and there is no likelihood that either capitalism or communism will survive a nuclear war.

If someone is difficult to talk to, if someone cannot communicate clearly, it's a real problem in terms of their likelihood to work out.

If we were to judge nature by common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed.

The goal is not to just have rapists expelled from schools. I don't want rapists transferring schools. I don't want them out there, being able to commit these crimes. I want them to go to prison. But if you understand this crime and you understand what happens in the reporting of this crime and the support that a victim does or does not get, you realize that our legislation increases the likelihood that a young woman will go to the police in a timely manner and that the police will investigate and that they will be able to administer real justice in the criminal system.

A young financial writer once brought ridicule upon himself by stating that a certain company had nothing to commend it except excellent earnings. Well, there are companies whose earnings are excellent but whose stocks I would never recommend. In selecting investments, I attach prime importance to the men behind them. I'd rather buy brains and character than earnings. Earnings can be good one year and poor the next. But if you put your money into securities run by men combining conspicuous brains and unimpeachable character, the likelihood is that the financial results will prove satisfactory.

Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have much harder, more tedious or painful lives than I do, overall.

Smart tech investor thinks about: a) future product roadmap, b) bottoms-up market size & growth, c) talent and skill of team. Essentially you are valuing things that have not yet happened, and the likelihood of the CEO and team being able to make them happen. Finance people find this appalling, but investors who do this well can make a lot of money.

The Noisiest buzz in the industry lately has been over the emerging use of cable TV systems to provide fast network data transmissions using a device called a cable modem. But the likelihood of this technology succeeding is zilch.

The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.

You should prepare to follow the program for 90 days. Why? Because behavioral research indicates that it takes 90 days to prepare for change, build a new behavior, become confident in the face of high-risk triggers, and move past the likelihood of relapse. Brain research also suggests that it takes a few months of practicing a new behavior to create permanent change.

We cannot doubt that barbaric people receive such influences more visibly and obviously, and in all likelihood more easily and fully than we do, for our life in cities, which deafens or kills the passive meditative life, and our education that enlarges the separated, self-moving mind, have made our souls less sensitive.

If increased meta-knowledge is not counter-balanced by a corresponding growth in consciousness then the likelihood of psycho-spiritual dysfunction is great.

...those little people, my brownies, who do one half of my work for me while I am fast asleep, and in all human likelihood do the rest for me as well, when I am wide awake and fondly suppose I do for myself.

If you're white and you're rich in the USA, if you get busted for drugs, you get a good attorney, and you in all likelihood serve no time. But if you're poor, black, Hispanic, or poor and white for that matter, you can get put in jail.

Today we no longer ask what really goes on in an atom; we ask what is likely to be observed-and with what likelihood-when we subject atoms to any specified influences such as light or heat, magnetic fields or electric currents.

We've had risk assessments performed by Harvard University, which said that even if we did have a small number of cases in this country that the likelihood of it spreading or getting into any kind of human health problem is very, very small.

I can scarcely fancy myself to ask a superior to publish a volume of my verse and I own that humanly there is very little likelihood of that ever coming to pass. And to be sure if I chose to look at things on one side and not the other I could of course regret this bitterly. But there is more peace and it isthe holier lot to be unknown than to be known.

Prepare for every negotiation... 1) Focus on Outcomes. What is it that you want to walk away with? Being as specific as possible also increases the likelihood of negotiation success. 2) Support your desired outcome with data that points to its reasonableness. 3) Writing down your key points in advance - and practicing them - enables you to stay focused on what's most important and avoid going off on tangents. 4) Err on the side of asking for more, rather than less [of what you really want]. 5) Be willing to walk away.

The art of war teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of the enemy's not coming, but on our own readiness to receive him; not on the chance of his not attacking, but rather on the fact that we have made our position unassailable.

In reality, the likelihood of reaching the pinnacle of capitalist society today is only marginally better than were the chances of being accepted into the French nobility four centuries ago, though at least an aristocratic age was franker, and therefore kinder, about the odds. It did not relentlessly play up the possibilities open to all, and so, in turn, did not cruelly equate an ordinary life with a failed one.

I think we may very well, in many areas, get likelihood, but not certitude. We don't want certitude anyway, do we?

Life can be lived as a temporary arrangement. Life is a temporary arrangement! But the longer you go without changing, the more obscure the likelihood you ever will. After enough time passes, the idea of another way of life grows even more misty.

The public hardly suspects that their purchase of cosmetics, pet food, toothpaste, eggs and other common items have, in all likelihood, caused some form of animal suffering.

Current organisms have a higher probability of sharing a single code if the common ancestry hypothesis is true than they'd have if the hypothesis of separate ancestry were true. That is, the simpler hypothesis has the higher likelihood in the technical sense of "likelihood" used in statistics.

...there are two (inter alia) two ways of ruining a society - namely, letting the market "be the sole director of the fate of human beings," and allowing technology  to permeate every aspect of our lives.  In the United States, both of these developments have converged, creating a huge chasm between rich and poor and pushing us over the edge into a kind of antisociety...  While these developments have been widely hailed as the dawn of a golden age, the likelihood is that they actually amount to a death knell, the beginning of the end of the American empire.

A thing is either alive or it isn’t; there is nothing that is almost alive. There is but the remotest possibility of the origin of life by spontaneous generation, and every likelihood that Arrhenius is right when he dares to claim that life is a cosmic phenomenon, something that drifts between the spheres, like light, and like light transiently descends upon those fit to receive it.

There is no likelihood of our being able to suppress humanity's aggressive tendencies... Complete suppression of man's aggressive tendencies is not an issue; what we may try is to direct it into a channel other than that of warfare.

The major problem for America is we're losing two wars. We're losing in Afghanistan, we're losing in Iraq. And there seems very little likelihood that we're going to increase the number of troops we have in either place to the point that we can prevail.

Placing a time limit on affirmative action would in all likelihood blunt the orchestrated politics of controversy that now bedevils it. And thinking about phasing it into a class-based entitlement program may at long last bring Americans around to a consideration of the growing inequality that threatens the harmony of our democracy far more than the alarmist cry of 'racial division.'

In the intercourse of social life, it is by little acts of watchful kindness recurring daily and hourly,--and opportunities of doing kindnesses if sought for are forever starting up,--it is by words, by tones, by gestures, by looks, that affection is won and preserved. He who neglects these trifles yet boasts that, whenever a great sacrifice is called for, he shall be ready to make it, will rarely be loved. The likelihood is, he will not make it; and if he does, it will be much rather for his own sake than for his neighbor's.

To undertake the direction of the economic life of people with widely divergent ideals and values is to assume responsibilities which commit one to the use of force; it is to assume a position where the best intentions cannot prevent one from being forced to act in a way which to some of those affected must appear highly immoral. This is true even if we assume the dominant power to be as idealistic and unselfish as we can possibly conceive. But how small is the likelihood that it will be unselfish, and how great are the temptations!

I have relentlessly beat the drum for Google's 'two-step' authentication systems for Gmail and other services, which radically reduce the likelihood that your account can be hacked from afar.

As the Deity has given us Greeks all other blessings in moderation, so our moderation gives us a kind of wisdom which is timid, in all likelihood, and fit for common people, not one which is kingly and splendid. This wisdom, such as it is, observing that human life is ever subject to all sorts of vicissitudes, forbids us to be puffed up by the good things we have, or to admire a man's felicity while there is still time for it to change.

Committing your goals to paper increases the likelihood of your achieving them by one thousand percent!

The language of North Korea is always bombastic. But what has really changed is the acceleration of their nuclear program, the likelihood that they have more and more weapons, and the acceleration of the testing of ballistic missiles in very, very aggressive ways towards Japan.

In 1960 I published a book that attempted to direct attention to the possibility of a thermonuclear war, to ways of reducing the likelihood of such a war, and to methods for coping with the consequences should war occur despite our efforts to avoid it.