Quotes About Risk

riesgo = peligro + escándalo.

De modo que es posible que acudir al hospital aumente ligeramente sus probabilidades de sobrevivir si tiene un problema grave, pero aumenta sus probabilidades de morir si no lo tiene.

The governing principle is precisely the same one that predicts behavior at the gas pump. When the price of gasoline is low, people choose to buy more gasoline. When the price of accidents (e.g., the probability of being killed or the expected medical bill) is low, people choose to have more accidents. You

Youths are chosen for combat precisely because they are unable to fully imagine their own mortality. If armies were composed of the middle-aged, there would be no wars.

The greatest risk of a deliberately planned urban epidemic is not that we won't have a vaccine, it's that we won't recognize the outbreak until it's too late for the vaccine to stop the spread of disease.

The glassmakers had brought a new source of wealth to Venice, but they had also brought the less appealing habit of burning down the neighborhood.

But the easiest way to live in the moment is to put yourself in a situation where there's no other choice.

Once danger becomes its own reward, risk moves from a threat to be avoided to a challenge to be risen toward.

Sooner or later, there's always a Jaws: a mental hurdle we can't clear, a decision too dangerous to attack head on. In those situations, sideways is forward.

the upper echelon of adventure sport athletes are grappling with the fundamental properties of the universe: gravity, velocity and sanity. They're toying with them, cheating death, refusing to accept there might be limits to what they can accomplish.

Fully alive and deeply committed is a risky business.

Nothing's too gnarly.

The greatest athletes aren't interested in the greatest risks. I mean, sometimes they're taken, sometimes not, but those physical risks are a by-product of a much deeper desire to take creative risks. Don't be fooled by the danger. In action and adventure sports, creativity is always the point.

It means you lose by not trying to play full out, by not trying to do the impossible—whatever that is for you.

While we've painted the guardians of the pale in a somewhat reactionary light, let's give the gatekeepers their due. What lies beyond the pale isn't always safe and secure. Outside the fence of state-sanctioned consciousness, there are, to be sure, peaks of profound insight and inspiration. But there are also the swamps of addiction, superstition, and groupthink, where the unprepared can get stuck.

Risk heightens focus and flow follows focus. This means that the fight-or-flight response primes the body—chemically and psychologically—for the flow state. Athletes report moving through one to get to the other.

It's why action and adventure athletes routinely risk life and limb for their sports and why spiritual ascetics willingly trade creature comforts for a chance to glimpse God.

Most people are so afraid of dying they never live.

The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese

Each of the pathways to nuclear terrorism, when examined carefully, turns out to have gantlets of improbabilities.

These upheavals were driven by the impression that African Americans are at serious risk of being killed by the police. Yet as with terrorism and school shootings, the numbers are surprising. A total of 65 unarmed Americans of all races are killed by the police in an average year, of which 23 are African American, which is around three tenths of one percent of the 7,500 African American homicide victims.

of this, to repeat, means that nuclear terrorism is impossible, only that it is not, as so many people insist, imminent, inevitable, or highly probable.

This may also explain societal decisions such as banning nuclear power, with its tiny risk of a disaster, rather than reducing the use of coal, with its daily drip of many more deaths.

Kahneman and Tversky conclude that people are not risk-averse across the board, though they are loss-averse: they seek risk if it may avoid a loss.29