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1 " We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred? "
― Richard Dawkins , Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder
2 " I better go," Carter squeezed me once more and stood, grabbing his wallet from the coffee table. " I need to hit up the lottery if I want to get you out of this mess. Will you let me buy a monkey if we win, though?" " Only if you buy me an island off the coast of Fiji." " You crazy-ass woman. A monkey is so much cooler than an island." " How about a monkey IN Fiji?" " Now there's a woman after my own heart," Carter slapped his hand to his chest, sighing dramatically. " I'll let you know if we win." He started for the door." Uh huh." " You'll know if we do. I'll be the one streaking on Pike Street. "
3 " It's been suggested that if the super-naturalists really had the powers they claim, they'd win the lottery every week. I prefer to point out that they could also win a Nobel Prize for discovering fundamental physical forces hitherto unknown to science. Either way, why are they wasting their talents doing party turns on television?By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out. "
― Richard Dawkins
4 " She opened her eyes and looked into his rather intensely. " What?" Alex asked. " This cannot be." " What can't be?" Alex asked her, more bafflement in his voice this time. " I have been reading people all my life. I can even read cats and dogs. I've been doing it all my life and i've been here longer than the two of you put together." " And?" Alex wanted to get to the point. Whatever the truth may be, he just wanted to hear it, wanted it on the table before them so he could get this over with and they can go home. " AND.....you are the first person that has nothing for me to see." " And here I was hoping you'd say I'd win the lottery or get married to a supermodel or something." Alex said, starting to laugh. " You don't understand. I don't see anything, anything at all. There is nothing to you, nothing but what I see before me." " So....what does that mean?" " It means you don't exist. "
5 " Why do things happen the way they do? Is there some kind of order in all this chaos that we just don't see, or is it all, as the mathematically minded people would like us to believe, just random coincidence? If you put one hundred apes in a room, they'll tell you, with one hundred typewriters, and given an infinite amount of time and bananas, one of them would eventually churn out the complete Oxford dictionary. It's all statistical math and probability. The odds of winning the lottery are greater than the odds of getting struck by lightning, but someone wins, don't they? And people get hit by lightning disturbingly more often that you would think. Their point is, eventually all things happen. No matter how philosophically unprejudiced you are, you can't argue with statistical probabilities. But you can certainly give the mathematicians some substantial cud to chew on, can't you? For instance, sure, everything may be eventual from a statistical point of view, but what happens to the formula if you plug in when a particular thing happens? The fortuitousness of the timing? Or combine a particular coincidence with other seemingly non-related coincidences that might have occurred within the same general time frame? We've all had it happen. It's one of our favorite phrases: " Why me? Why now?" Well, when you take the " when" into account, all kinds of very interesting and un-mathematical things begins to happen. The coincidence becomes too coincidental to be a coincidence. "
6 " Often we suffer because we don’t realize what’s essential.We may want to be rich, but the rich are lonely.We see all those people on TV that have won the lottery and want to be at their place, but studies show that they are even more miserable after having won the big check. They don’t really know what to do with all that money, take poor decisions on how to spend them, change themselves and their friends don’t see them in the same way. "
― Lidiya K. , This Moment
7 " No longer enslaved or made dependent by force of law, the great majority are so by force of poverty; they are still chained to a place, to an occupation, and to conformity with the will of an employer, and debarred, by the accident of birth both from the enjoyments, and from the mental and moral advantages, which others inherit without exertion and independently of desert. That this is an evil equal to almost any of those against which mankind have hitherto struggled, the poor are not wrong in believing. Is it a necessary evil? They are told so by, those who do not feel it---by those who have gained the prizes in the lottery of life. But it was also said that slavery, that despotism, that all the privileges of oligarchy, were necessary. "
― John Stuart Mill , Socialism
8 " Your oddity is your hottest commodity but you scratch yourself like it's the lottery to reject yourself mentally, spiritually & bodily. "
― Curtis Tyrone Jones , Mirrors Of The Sun: Finding Reflections Of Light In The Shittiness Of Life
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10 " I have been happier in the past week than I ever imagined possible and it doesn't have a damn thing to do with the money. You're the real prize. The lottery was just a bonus. "
― Amanda Young , Windfall
11 " It means that your birth, with all your particulars, is a wildly improbable event, and hence precious. You won the sweepstakes by being born at all. Think of all the wallflower sperm and egg cells. You made it, buddy. Whew! What a staggering wonder! What a thing to rejoice in! The lottery wasn't fixed! God didn't rig it! You won fair and square! What a miracle! "
― Robert M. Price
12 " Catholicism - all the perversions of Christianity - is not a faith of love. It is a faith of fear. Obey, be good, toe the line, and heaven is yours, the first prize in the lottery of eternity. Disobey, react, cut the lifeline, and never-ceasing damnation is the booby prize. The dogma is, love the only god and you shall be safe. Fail in that love and he will not rescue you, not until you crawl and apologize and fawn before the altar. What kind of a religion demands such indignity? "
13 " science says that nobody is ever made happy by getting a promotion, winning the lottery or even finding true love. People are made happy by one thing and one thing only - pleasant sensations in their bodies "
― Yuval Noah Harari , Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow
14 " You know you are capitalism’s ideal puppet (and that education betrayed you) when winning the lottery is your only chance to realizing financial freedom. "
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana
15 " Say It So You Lift Your Spirits: Even non-Scandinavians and optimists can feel their moods dampen during the dark of night. Luckily there are some easy ways to lift your spirits. Here are three:1. When describing something in the past, what role do you play in the story? Are more of your most retold stories anchored by a positively or a negatively felt incidents? Those who are most resilient, energetic, caring and involved with others tend to link their stories to redemptive themes.Those who are plagued by down moods often mark their stories with what went wrong and don't include a redeeming detail. These narrative themes affect our choices -- what we think we have to choose from -- and how others see us.2. We each have many personalities inside us. Some situations enable us to use our best talents and display our best side. Instead of attempting to be a " virtuoso juggler" as many women do, discover the specific situations where you thrive. When you can identify those moments you are better able, like a defensive driver, to see potential danger farther ahead where situations or individuals spark your discomfort or worse.Conversely, knowing where you shine (temperament and talent) means you can make smarter choices about how you work and live -- and with whom. While Marcus Buckingham's book is intended for women, I know three male friends who have found it helpful in how they seek the situations that best serve them -- professionally, personally and socially.3. We each have a set point along the continuum of pessimistic to optimistic. After winning the lottery or experiencing the death of a loved one, we eventually return to that set point. "
16 " Weirdly—but as Danny and Amos had suspected—the further the winning number was from the number on a person's lottery ticket, the less regret they felt. " In defiance of logic, there is a definite sense that one comes closer to winning the lottery when one's ticket number is similar to the number that won," Danny wrote in a memo to Amos, summarizing their data. In another memo, he added that " the general point is that the same state of affairs (objectively) can be experienced with very different degrees of misery," depending on how easy it is to imagine that things might have turned out differently.Regret was sufficiently imaginable that people conjured it out of situations they had no control over. But it was of course at its most potent when people might have done something to avoid it. What people regretted, and the intensity with which they regretted it, was not obvious. "
17 " Always remember that you are an Englishman and therefore have drawn first prize in the lottery of life. "
18 " Remember that you are an Englishman and consequently have won first prize in the lottery of life. "
19 " I figure you have the same chance of winning the lottery whether you play or not. "
― Fran Lebowitz
20 " Our friend, Timothy J. Russert, was a man who awoke every morning as if he had just won the lottery the day before. He was determined to take full advantage of his good fortune that he couldn't quite believe and share it with everyone around him. "
