Quotes on Risk

Information is power, and the gain you get from empowering your associates more than offsets the risk of informing your competitor.

I focus on the most important form of innumeracy in everyday life, statistical innumeracy--that is, the inability to reason about uncertainties and risk.

There is my father whispering in my ear, Be still still still. And yet you change everything. What was the marsh like, waiting for the storm before you came and kneeled in the water? It was nothing. Watch after you leave the water, now cold and regretful, miles from home, certain of the belt on your backside, the cold shoulder, the extra chores; watch. Watch the water heal itself of your presence--not to repair injury but to offer itself again should you care to risk another strapping [...].

If your friends are obese, your risk of obesity is 45 percent higher. ... If your friend's friends are obese, your risk of obesity is 25 percent higher. ... If your friend's friend's friend, someone you probably don't even know, is obese, your risk of obesity is 10 percent higher. It's only when you get to your friend's friend's friend's friends that there's no longer a relationship between that person's body size and your own body size.

Our lives improve only when we take chances - and the first and most difficult risk we can take is to be honest with ourselves.

Networked, we are together, but so lessened are our expectations of each other that we can feel utterly alone. And there is the risk that we come to see others as objects to be accessed—and only for the parts we find useful, comforting, or amusing.

To reduce risk it is necessary to avoid a portfolio whose securities are all highly correlated with each other. One hundred securities whose returns rise and fall in near unison afford little protection than the uncertain return of a single security.

Over the years I have become convinced that we learn best - and change - from hearing stories that strike a chord within us ... Those in leadership positions who fail to grasp or use the power of stories risk failure for their companies and for themselves.

To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.

If you don't take risks you won't achieve anything.

May we never risk the life of our souls by being resentful or by bearing grudges.

Greatness as a leader is measured in part by your willingness to accept daunting challenges. Achieving tough goals requires practicing the secret of commitment: Risk all to win all.

When love is a theory, it's safe, it's free of risk. But love in the brain changes nothing.

The secret is to throw yourself into the water of life again and again, not to hang back, no reservations, risk everything, but above all strike out boldly with all you have.

The capacity for imaginative reflex, for moral risk in any human being is not limitless; on the contrary, it can be rapidly absorbed by fictions, and thus the cry in the poem may come to sound louder, more urgent, more real than the cry in the street outside. The death in the novel may move us more potently than the death in the next room. Thus there may be a covert, betraying link between the cultivation of aesthetic response and the potential of personal inhumanity.

I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.

Whoever refuses to remember the inhumanity is prone to new risks of infection.

The idea of an entrepreneur is really thinking out of the box and taking risks and stepping up to major challenges.

Throughout the ages there have always been those who have been willing to go beyond the norms and reach for that unknown and distant star.

In some ways, it's easier to settle for someone else's version of success than to risk falling short at one's own.

To endow animals with human emotions has long been a scientific taboo. But if we do not, we risk missing something fundamental, about both animals and us.