Quotes About Risk

Figure 12-5 shows that in 1970 the chance that an airline passenger would die in a plane crash was less than five in a million; by 2015 that small risk had fallen a hundredfold.

for an American woman, being pregnant a century ago was almost as dangerous as having breast cancer today.

The asymmetry has been confirmed in the lab by showing that people will take a bigger gamble to avoid a sure loss than to improve on a sure gain

As Winston Churchill noted, "Always remember, however sure you are that you can easily win, that there would not be a war if the other man did not think he also had a chance.

So holding many factors constant, we find that living in a civilization reduces one's chances of being a victim of violence fivefold.

The writer Warwick Cairns calculated that if you wanted your child to be kidnapped and held overnight by a stranger, you'd have to leave the child outside and unattended for 750,000 years.211

The sixty years with nuclear power have seen thirty-one deaths in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, the result of extraordinary Soviet-era bungling, together with a few thousand early deaths from cancer above the 100,000 natural cancer deaths in the exposed population.

It's often said that with climate change, those who know the most are the most frightened, but with nuclear power, those who know the most are the least frightened.

According to the National Safety Council, the horse-associated fatality rate was ten times the car-associated rate of modern times [in 1974, which is more than double the per capita rate today—SP].45

descuido de la probabilidad».

Plane crashes, in contrast, get lavish coverage, but they kill only about 250 people a year worldwide, making planes about a thousand times safer per passenger mile than cars.

El Dios de la Biblia hebrea, siempre misericordioso, dijo a la primera mujer: -Tantas haré tus fatigas cuantos sean tus embarazos: con dolor parirás los hijos-. Hasta hace poco tiempo, en torno a 1% de las madres morían en el parto; para una mujer estadounidense, estar embarazada hace un siglo era casi tan peligroso como tener cáncer de mama en la actualidad.

loss aversion, the sunk-cost fallacy, and throwing good money after bad, is patently irrational, but it is surprisingly pervasive in human decision-making.

To take another low-death/high-fear hazard, rampage killings in American schools claim around 35 victims a year, compared with about 16,000 routine police-blotter homicides.25 Yet American schools have implemented billions of dollars of dubious safety measures, like installing bulletproof whiteboards and arming teachers with pepperball guns, while traumatizing children with terrifying active-shooter drills.

Not surprisingly, many people have a fear of flying, but almost no one has a fear of driving. People rank tornadoes (which kill about fifty Americans a year) as a more common cause of death than asthma (which kills more than four thousand Americans a year), presumably because tornadoes make for better television.

The writer Warwick Cairns calculated that if you wanted your child to be kidnapped and held overnight by a stranger, you'd have to leave the child outside and unattended for 750,000 years.

To take just two examples, more than twice as many children are hit by cars driven by parents taking their children to school as by other kinds of traffic, so when more parents drive their children to school to prevent them from getting killed by kidnappers, more children get killed.

Tversky and Kahneman note that no one would buy probabilistic insurance, with premiums at a fraction of the cost but coverage only on certain days of the week, though they happily incur the same overall risk by insuring themselves against some hazards, like fires, but not others, like hurricanes.27 They buy insurance for peace of mind—to give themselves one less thing to worry about.

Love is a dangerous commodity-fraught with peril.

We're all doing what we love. It's how we express ourselves - operating in a space where you don't know if something is possible or not.

I did not just fall in love. I made a parachute jump.

You can't shut off the risk and the pain without losing the love that remains.

Take a chance. Take a risk. Find that passion and rekindle it. Fall in love all over again. It's really worth it.

Never love a wild thing...If you let yourself love a wild thing. You'll end up looking at the sky.