Definition of Probability

Probability

The quality or state of being probable; appearance of reality or truth; reasonable ground of presumption; likelihood.

That which is or appears probable; anything that has the appearance of reality or truth.

Likelihood of the occurrence of any event in the doctrine of chances, or the ratio of the number of favorable chances to the whole number of chances, favorable and unfavorable. See 1st Chance, n., 5.

Related Definitions:

And, Any, Anything, Appearance, Being, Chance, Doctrine, Event, Favorable, Ground, Has, In, Is, Likelihood, Number, Occurrence, Of, Or, Presumption, Probable, Quality, Ratio, Reality, Reasonable, See, State, That, The, To, Truth, Unfavorable, Which, Whole

Probability Quotations

The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just.
Abraham Lincoln

We can say with certainty - or 90% probability - that the new industries that are about to be born will have nothing to do with information.
Peter Drucker

The laws of probability, so true in general, so fallacious in particular.
Edward Gibbon

The 50-50-90 rule: Anytime you have a 50-50 chance of getting something right, there's a 90% probability you'll get it wrong.
Andy Rooney

The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle.
Hannah Arendt

The scientific imagination always restrains itself within the limits of probability.
Thomas Huxley

Entropy theory, on the other hand, is not concerned with the probability of succession in a series of items but with the overall distribution of kinds of items in a given arrangement.
Rudolf Arnheim

From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.
Tom Stoppard

The consequences of an act affect the probability of it's occurring again.
B. F. Skinner

Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.
William Osler

The fact that we don't keep repeating tests in the same arena is not because the probability of the hypothesis showing its falsity in other arenas goes up after it has passed tests in one arena.
Robert Nozick

What is being talked about now is the probability of the Sharon government launching an attack against Lebanon to eliminate the resistance of Hezbollah by using the American war against Iraq. But, of course, in this case, we will certainly fight with all our strength.
Hassan Nasrallah

Let me state what the official IPCC prediction is: Sea levels could go up as much as three-quarters of a meter in this century, but there is a reasonable probability it could be much higher than that.
Steven Chu

I don't believe in providence and fate, as a technologist I am used to reckoning with the formulae of probability.
Max Frisch

If we look at the way the universe behaves, quantum mechanics gives us fundamental, unavoidable indeterminacy, so that alternative histories of the universe can be assigned probability.
Murray Gell-Mann

Life is a school of probability.
Walter Bagehot

But to us, probability is the very guide of life.
Joseph Butler

We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.
Zbigniew Brzezinski

In the U.S.A. or Europe there is no realistic way to estimate the type, magnitude, or probability of the risk, nor any way to narrow down the potentially affected regions.
Jurgen Habermas

In the financial system we have today, with less risk concentrated in banks, the probability of systemic financial crises may be lower than in traditional bank-centered financial systems.
Timothy Geithner

When you turn from one room to the next, when your animal senses no longer perceive the sounds of the dishwasher, the ticking clock, the smell of a chicken roasting - the kitchen and all its seemingly discrete bits dissolve into nothingness - or into waves of probability.
Robert Lanza

They were being driven to a prison, through no fault of their own, in all probability for life. In comparison, how much easier it would be to walk to the gallows than to this tomb of living horrors!
Nellie Bly

One important measurement issue concerns the fat tails problem that I mentioned earlier. VAR is concerned with extreme outcomes. If the tails of the probability distributions we are using are too thin, our VAR measures are likely to be too low.
John Hull

In trials of fact, by oral testimony, the proper inquiry is not whether is it possible that the testimony may be false, but whether there is sufficient probability that it is true.
Simon Greenleaf

Probability is expectation founded upon partial knowledge. A perfect acquaintance with all the circumstances affecting the occurrence of an event would change expectation into certainty, and leave nether room nor demand for a theory of probabilities.
George Boole

Fourth Law of Thermodynamics: If the probability of success is not almost one, then it is damn near zero.
David R. Ellis

A property in the 100-year floodplain has a 96 percent chance of being flooded in the next hundred years without global warming. The fact that several years go by without a flood does not change that probability.
Earl Blumenauer

Psychology helps to measure the probability that an aim is attainable.
Edward Thorndike

It is almost possible to predict one or two days in advance, within a rather broad range of probability, what the weather is going to be; it is even thought that it will not be impossible to publish daily forecasts, which would be very useful to soci.
Antoine Lavoisier

If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic, we should not get very far in our understanding of the physical world. One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker entirely by the use of the mathematics of probability.
Vannevar Bush

More Probability Quotations

Probability Translations

probability in German is Wahrscheinlichkeit, wahrscheinlich
probability in Italian is verosimiglianza
probability in Spanish is probabilidad, apariencia
probability in Swedish is sannolikhet

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