Quotes About Risk

If you do, you'll be running an incalculable risk. It will be up to you whether the world begins to live again or stands still forever and a day. Are you really prepared to take that risk?

You'd really set a hungry werewolf free? Do you know what that means? Nobody would be safe from me.' 'I know,' said Atreyu. 'But I'm Nobody. Why should I be afraid of you?

There is nothing more dangerous in life than dreams that come true...

When a population is distracted by trivia," wrote Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death, "when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk. Culture death is a real possibility.

They talk about adrenaline, but Marder knew it was much more than adrenaline; it was a mystical cocktail that comes only from this one act, from killing men at the risk of yourself dying, a Pleistocene inheritance, disgusting and marvelous at the same time. Sports, even violent sports, were just a pale shadow of this. Why they'd never abolish war.

Having talent and not putting it on the line is just like not having it and desperately wanting to be recognized

Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it saved my ass.

I can accept failure. Everyone fails at something. But I can't accept not trying.

Warren Buffett is fond of saying that any player unaware of the fool in the market probably is the fool in the market.

I thought instead of a good rule for survival on Wall Street: Never agree to anything proposed on someone else's boat or you'll regret in in the morning.

From the snap of the ball to the snap of the first bone is closer to four seconds than to five. and Lawrence Taylor (fearless tackle) WE all have fears, we all have fears!!

The line between gambling and investing is artificial and thin. The soundest investment has the defining trait of a bet (you losing all of your money in hopes of making a bit more), and the wildest speculation has the salient characteristic of an investment (you might get your money back with interest). Maybe the best definition of "investing" is "gambling with the odds in your favor.

What are the odds that people will make smart decisions about money if they don't need to make smart decisions—if they can get rich making dumb decisions?

Wall Street investment banks are like Las Vegas casinos: They set the odds. The customer who plays zero-sum games against them may win from time to time but never systematically, and never so spectacularly that he bankrupts the casino.

It was like a broken slot machine in the casino that pays off every time. It would keep paying off until someone said something about it; but no one who played the slot machine had any interest in pointing out that it was broken.

Complicated financial stuff was being dreamed up for the sole purpose of lending money to people who could never repay it.

The U.S. financial markets had always been either corrupt or about to be corrupted.

Charlie Ledley—curiously uncertain Charlie Ledley—was odd in his belief that the best way to make money on Wall Street was to seek out whatever it was that Wall Street believed was least likely to happen, and bet on its happening.

They had stumbled either upon a serious flaw in modern financial markets or into a great gambling run. Characteristically, they were not sure which it was. As Charlie pointed out, "It's really hard to know when you're lucky and when you're smart.

The world's not just a stage. It's a casino, and our lives are games of chance. And when people calculate the odds in any life situation, they are often making judgments about similarity—or (strange new word!) representativeness. You

What Gutfreund said has become a legend at Salomon Brothers and a visceral part of its corporate identity. He said: "One hand, one million dollars, no tears.

Risk, I had learned, was a commodity in itself.

He gave a talk in which he argued that the way they measured risk was completely idiotic. They measured risk by volatility: how much a stock or bond happened to have jumped around in the past few years. Real risk was not volatility; real risk was stupid investment decisions.

How do you explain to an innocent citizen of the free world the importance of a credit default swap on a double-A tranche of a subprime-backed collateralized debt obligation?