Quotes About Risk

Apparently after six days baking pigs and herding bricks, the inhabitants would kick back with a spot of cock-fighting, bullbaiting, and ratting. It was the sort of place an adventurous gentleman might venture only if he didn't mind being beaten, rolled, and catching an exciting venereal disease.

We didn't bother to handcuff him, which surprised Agent Reynolds. Kittredge told her it was Metropolitan Police policy to avoid handcuffing suspects unless physical restraint is necessary—thus avoiding the risk of chafing, positional asphyxiation, and injury sustained by falling over your own feet and smacking your face into the pavement.

Kumar and I ended up stuffing tissue paper up our nostrils, but agreed that if we had to come down again more drastic action would be justified - like amputation.

Even in these days of eBay and superencrypted anonymous purchasing over the Internet, the safest way to buy stolen stuff is to meet a total stranger and hand over a wedge of untraceable cash. They don't know you, you don't know them - the only problem is where to meet.

How many fools have looked forward to the adventure that killed them.

It's always the easy way out, being an existential chicken. Not really being there. It's harder, it's riskier, to be present.

When you're testing to see how deep water is, never use two feet.

You can get in way more trouble with a good idea than a bad idea, because you forget that the good idea has limits.

The chief losses to investors come from the purchase of low-quality securities at times of favorable business conditions.

Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.

In a craven and hierarchical organization, the only thing more dangerous in revealing your own ignorance, is to draw attention to the stupidity of the boss.

Here was heroism, but here, too, was mounted suicide in full-dress costume.

In a word, adventure to Chapman is the breath of life. Given adventure he has the courage to achieve the unbelievable.

true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.

In war, no variable is more important, and less easy to control, than the element of surprise.

If the Germans invaded and there was a danger the double agents might fall into enemy hands, "they will be liquidated forcibly." Robertson was becoming fond of his brood of double agents. But he would not hesitate to kill them if he had to.

Montagu and Cholmondeley took turns lying in the back and trying to sleep, as if that were possible when being driven at high speed by a myopic Grand Prix driver with no headlights. This was the closest either came to death in action during the war

The pantheon of world-changing spies is small and select, and Oleg Gordievsky is in it: he opened up the inner workings of the KGB at a pivotal juncture in history, revealing not just what Soviet intelligence was doing (and not doing), but what the Kremlin was thinking and planning, and in so doing transformed the way the West thought about the Soviet Union. He risked his life to betray his country, and made the world a little safer.

Ben Macintyre

The most remarkable new arrival was Eddie Chapman, the British safecracker parachuted into East Anglia in December 1942, who would become "Agent Zigzag." Each fresh arrival, each intercepted spy, each potential new double agent, added to the strength of the system and the mountain of paper.

The central plank of the deception was to be nailed down by planting false information through the double agents. Cockade was not quite the grand roll of the dice envisaged by Masterman, but it was the most ambitious gamble so far.

The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.

Thomas's mistake, like most of the behavior he leaked into the world, had been avoidable: to join another human being in a situation that virtually demanded unscripted, spontaneous conversation, and thus to risk total moral and emotional dissolution. Death by conversation, and all that.

As an entrepreneur, you had one, maybe two, but usually not more than three chances to catch lightning in a bottle; as a venture capitalist, however, you could chase lightning as long as you had cash to invest.