Commerce flourishes by circumstances, precarious, transitory, contingent, almost as the winds and waves that bring it to our shores.
Charles Caleb Colton

Engineering, medicine, business, architecture and painting are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent - not with how things are but with how they might be - in short, with design.
Herbert Simon

Everything is contingent, and there is also chaos.
Spalding Gray

Evolution thus is merely contingent on certain processes articulated by Darwin: variation and selection.
Ernst Mayr

First you wonder if they're separate stories, but no, they're not, they're contingent stories and they form a pattern. And you begin with some of the island as the place to which the heroine of the book returns.
Robert Creeley

For me it's always contingent on getting a sound-the sound always suggests what kind of melody it should be. So it's always sound first and then the line afterwards.
Brian Eno

If the law is a bad law, there is always the contingent right to take action that you would not otherwise take.
James Callaghan

Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.
Charles Baudelaire

Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, which make up one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable. This transitory fugitive element, which is constantly changing, must not be despised or neglected.
Pierre Charles Baudelaire

Modernity signifies the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable.
Charles Baudelaire

Nothing in the universe is contingent, but all things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature.
Baruch Spinoza

Our safety at home and the cause of freedom abroad is largely contingent upon our success in Iraq.
Ron Lewis

Sales are contingent upon the attitude of the salesman - not the attitude of the prospect.
W. Clement Stone

The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief, which is at the heart of all popular religion, that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.
Richard Adams

The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief... that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.
Walter Lippmann

The time has come to underscore the fact that our and others' rights are contingent on our willingness to assert and defend them.
John Charles Polanyi

There are also two kinds of truths: truth of reasoning and truths of fact. Truths of reasoning are necessary and their opposite is impossible; those of fact are contingent and their opposite is possible.
Gottfried Leibniz

There has always been quite a strong black and white art tradition in Australia, with quite a large contingent of cartoonists, given the size of the population.
Pat Oliphant

To say it another way, thinking, however abstract, originates in an embodied subjectivity, at once overdetermined and permeable to contingent events.
Teresa de Lauretis

We are aware that in 2005 our efforts to preserve the stability and prestige of the Republic of Bulgaria in the area of foreign policy, and our efforts to attain fully our strategic goals will be mostly contingent upon the way we address our domestic priorities.
Georgi Purvanov