I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity.
Johnny Cash: I want to marry you and I am telling you it's the time. June Carter: Well I'm telling you with 100 percent certainty that it is not the time. It's not about time, it's not the right time, it's not even quarter to the right time.
Narrator: Oh, yeah, Chloe... Chloe looked the way Meryl Streep's skeleton would look if you made it smile and walk around the party being extra nice to everybody. Chloe: Well, I'm still here. But I don't know for how long. That's as much certainty as anyone can give me. But I've got some good news: I no longer have any fear of death. But... I am in a pretty lonely place. No one will have sex with me. I'm so close to the end, and all I want is to get laid for the last time. I have pornographic movies in my apartment, and lubricants, and amyl nitrite... [the group leader takes the mic] Group Leader: Thank you, Chloe... everyone, let's thank Chloe.
Samuel Bicke: Certainty is the disease of kings.
Some care is needed in using Descartes' argument.
Throughout my life, I've realized there are certain things you should never do: never try to be someone else, never let anyone tell you you can't follow your dreams, and never take no for an answer.
Ted Grey: How do you know I won't tell? Jake Gallo: Because there so happens to exist distinct physical evidence putting you at the crime scene at the time of death. I know because I placed it there. And I can prove with a mathematical certainty that you killed him, but that won't really matter if you're the boy I think you are.
To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.
I act with complete certainty. But this certainty is my own.
Alan Dershowitz: We've got two big problems here. The case against him is very strong but more importantly is the absolute certainty that Claus is guilty, finding grounds for reversal won't be enough here. Judges on the Rhode Island Supreme Court will have to go home to their wives and explain to them why they reversed. To do that we have to totally obliterate the States case so that they have no other reason to affirm. Total victory or we are dead in the water. Now, I assumed you've all had a chance to go over the transcripts and materials, first impressions? [Minnie raises her hand] Alan Dershowitz: Yeah, Minnie. Minnie: I think this whole case stinks! I think Von Bulow stinks! He's obviously guilty of something pretty despicable and if we free him we become his accessories, accomplices after the fact. I'm really shocked with your reputation for defending the poor and oppressed that you've taken this case. [Stands up] Minnie: I won't have anything to do with it, and I hope my fellow students won't either. Alan Dershowitz: Can I exercise my first ammendment right to free speech? If lawyers only defended innocent clients there would only be 12 defense attorneys and none of you would be able to find a job. Minnie: Why help guilty people get off? Alan Dershowitz: Oh you're sure he's guilty, 100% sure? Minnie: He had a lawyer. He had a trial. He was convicted. Alan Dershowitz: Are you sure he had a fair trial? Minnie: Come on! Alan Dershowitz: It's the basis of the whole legal system! Everyone gets a defense. So the system is there for the innocent person falsely accused. Ok, say it's you Ok? [referring to Minnie] Alan Dershowitz: You decide you're gonna get a divorce, you're gonna divorce your husband. A week later you're accused of child abuse. [Minnie smiles in disbelief] Alan Dershowitz: Oh, no don't give me that people do it all the time. Suddenly you're alone it's a disaster. Everyone thinks that you are guilty. Even the mailman is looking at you a little funny. There's only one person who can help you. There's only one person who you can trust, your lawyer. Minnie: Yeah, ok, so someone has to defend Claus. But why you, why us? Alan Dershowitz: Look, you're my student, you, you have a choice. You don't have to do anything you don't want to do; that is your choice. The reason I take cases and here unlike most other lawyers, who are not professors and therefore have to make a living: I take cases because I get pissed off, and I am pissed off here. The family hired a private prosecutor: unacceptable! They conducted a private search! Now if we let them get away with that, rich people won't go to the cops any more. You know what they're going to do? They're going to get their own lawyers to collect evidence, and then they are going to choose which evidence they feel like passing on to the DA. And the next victim isn't going to be rich, like Von Bülow but it's going to be some poor schnook in Detroit who can't afford, or who can't find, a decent lawyer. I think it's a little more complicated than your simple moral superiority, hmm?
Aaron: [voiceover on the phone continued from the beginning] I can tell you with certainty what I did that night, when it was my turn, but I think it would do little good. Because what the world remembers, the actuality, the last revision, is what counts, apparently. So, how many times did it take Aaron, as he cycled through the same conversations, lip-synching trivia over and over? How many times would it take, before he got it right? Three? Four? Twenty? I've decided to believe that only one more would have done it. I can almost sleep at night, if there's only one more. Slowly and methodically, he reverse-engineered a perfect moment. He took from his surroundings what was needed, and made of it something more. And once the details had been successfully navigated, there was nothing more. Maybe the last minute moral debate... until the noise of the room escalates into panic and background screams, as the gunman walks in.
Gimli: Certainty of death. Small chance of success. What are we waiting for?
Fanny Chenal: Do you know why I spent the night with you? So that now you have done what you came here to do, you will not return. For us there can be no future. There is certainty in that.
No one knows for sure about the future. But if you feel reluctant to plan something about it, then someone with guts would define it for you.
Robert Hobbes: I have met three presidents. I have captured terrorists. I deserve to die in action, Eberts, not just to be filed away! Albert Eberts: What you regard as inconsequential dental forms are in fact more, much more. Robert Hobbes: Oh God. Albert Eberts: They are in fact symbols, symbols of America. When all the world will little note, nor longer remember what we have done today in these hallowed halls, I tell you this with no degree of uncertainty that forms filed in triplicate are the very foundation of democracy. Why do we file, Robert, why? One word... Freedom.
My language limitations here are real. My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life. If I really knew this language, there would surely be in my head, as there is in Webster's or the Dictionary of American Slang, that unreducible verb designed to tell a person like me what to do next.
Il n'est pas certain que tout soit incertain. (Translation: It is not certain that everything is uncertain.)
V: There's no certainty - only opportunity.
Charley Price: He had found the band of jackals he needed. But as Jack McCall rode through the center of town, he experienced the terrifying certainty that a man faces when he's about to make his own name famous. He lacked both a hero's calm and a coward's resolve to survive at any price.
And I said, 'That last thing is what you can't get, Carlo. Nobody can get to that last thing. We keep on living in hopes of catching it once and for all.
He fell silent. For several moments they all did, and the quiet had the feel of a deliberate thing. Then Eddie said,
If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties.
Why do people resist [engines, bridges, and cities] so? They are symbols and products of the imagination, which is the force that ensures justice and historical momentum in an imperfect world, because without imagination we would not have the wherewithal to challenge certainty, and we could never rise above ourselves.
When all is said and done, the weather and love are the two elements about which one can never be sure.
It (trying to keep the law) grants you the power to judge others and feel superior to them. You believe you are living to a higher standard than those you judge. Enforcing rules, especially in its more subtle expressions like responsibility and expectation, is a vain attempt to create certainly out of uncertainty. And contrary to what you might think, I have a great fondness for uncertainty. Rules cannot bring freedom; they only have the power to accuse.
Questioning anything within doubt, will just bring mind to no certainty.
Chance is commonly viewed as a self-correcting process in which a deviation in one direction induces a deviation in the opposite direction to restore the equilibrium. In fact, deviations are not
Whether it is good or evil, whether life in itself is pain or pleasure, whether it is uncertain-that it may perhaps be this is not important-but the unity of the world, the coherence of all events, the embracing of the big and the small from the same stream, from the same law of cause, of becoming and dying.
If our future generations were much wilier than us, then it might be them who have led us all this time, to make decisions which fit to their pre-existence, left us live in the world of uncertainty or by faith.
No one ever said that you would live to see the repercussions of everything you do, or that you have guarantees, or that you are not obliged to wander in the dark, or that everything will be proved to you and neatly verified like something in science. Nothing is: at least nothing that is worthwhile. I didn't bring you up only to move across sure ground. I didn't teach you to think that everything must be within our control or understanding. Did I? For, if I did, I was wrong. I fyou won't take a chance, then the powers you refuse because you cannot explain them, will, as they say, make a monkey out of you.
The South African artist William Kentridge speaks to this type of certainty: 'To say that one needs art, or politics, that incorporate ambiguity and contradiction is not to say that one then stops recognizing and condemning things as evil. However, it might stop one being so utterly convinced of the certainty of one's own solutions. There needs to be a strong understanding of fallibility and how the very act of certainty or authoritativeness can bring disasters.' The outcome of the current crisis is already determined.
For certain is death for the born And certain is birth for the dead; Therefore over the inevitable Thou shouldst not grieve.
Risk means 'shit happens' or 'good luck
What word or expression do you most overuse? Re-reading a collection of my stuff, I was rather startled to find that it was 'perhaps.
One of the few certainties in life is that persons of certainty should certainly be avoided.
Luck is a favorable thing out of an uncertainty. No such thing as luck when everything's certain.
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