# Quote — Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard's Walk

> Historians whose profession is to study the past, are as wary as scientists of the idea that events unfold in a manner that can be predicted. In fact, in a study of history the illusion of inevitability has serious consequences that it is one of the few things that both conservative and socialist historians can agree on.

- Author: [Leonard Mlodinow](https://www.leafyquotes.com/leonard-mlodinow.md)
- Book: [The Drunkard's Walk](https://www.leafyquotes.com/leonard-mlodinow/the-drunkards-walk.md)
- Page: 201
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Leonard_Mlodinow#The_Drunkard's_Walk_(2008)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/leonard-mlodinow/the-drunkards-walk/historians-whose-profession

## More from this book

> The law of small numbers is not really a law. It is a sarcastic name describing the misguided attempt to apply the law of large numbers when the numbers aren't large.

p. 99 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/leonard-mlodinow/the-drunkards-walk/the-law-of-small.md)

> The fact that human intuition is ill suited to situations involving uncertainty was known as early as the 1930's, when researchers noted that people could neither make up a sequence of numbers that passed mathematical tests for randomness nor recognize reliably whether a given string was randomly generated.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/leonard-mlodinow/the-drunkards-walk/the-fact-that.md)

> It is one of those contradictions of life that although measurement always carries uncertainty, the uncertainty in measurement is rarely discussed.

p. 129 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/leonard-mlodinow/the-drunkards-walk/it-is-one.md)