Quotes About Risk

In America, Benjamin Franklin famously risked his life by flying a kite in an electrical storm.

Leeuwenhoek himself occasionally got carried away with his enthusiasms. In one of his least successful experiments13 he tried to study the explosive properties of gunpowder by observing a small blast at close range; he nearly blinded himself in the process.

Bipedalism is a demanding and risky strategy.

more than half of all first heart attacks (fatal or otherwise) occur in people who are fit and healthy and have no known obvious risks. They don't smoke or drink to excess, are not seriously overweight, and do not have chronically high blood pressure or even bad cholesterol readings, but they get a heart attack anyway. Living a virtuous life doesn't guarantee that you will escape heart problems; it just improves your chances.

A person who smokes cigarettes regularly (about a pack a day) is fifty times more likely than a nonsmoker to get cancer. In

effects were horrific – Evans needed a kidney transplant and all members of the party suffered lasting damage – yet nothing in the taste alerted anyone to the perils

unstable plane for a day and a half through storm and cloud and darkness while intricately balancing the flow of fuel through five tanks governed by fourteen valves, and navigating his way across a void without landmarks. When he needed to check his position or log a note, he would have to spread his work out on his lap and hold the stick between his knees; if it was nighttime he would have to grip a small flashlight between his teeth.

No one knows, because it is essentially impossible to determine, to what extent environmental factors contribute to cancers now. More than eighty thousand chemicals are produced commercially in the world today, and by one calculation 86 percent of them have never been tested for their effects on humans.

In other words , according to the McMaster study, too little salt is at least as risky as too much.

There are thousands of things that can kill us—slightly more than eight thousand, according to the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems compiled by the World Health Organization—and we escape every one of them but one.

Americans are five times more likely to asphyxiate while eating than Britons.

84 percent of chicken breasts, nearly 70 percent of ground beef, and getting on for half of pork chops contained intestinal E. coli, which is not good news for anything but the coli. *1

The largest source of foodborne illness is not meat or eggs or mayonnaise, as commonly supposed, but green leafy vegetables. They account for one in five of all food illnesses.

When more than one teenager is in a car, for instance, the risk of an accident multiplies by 400 percent.

The best indicator of personal risk is whether you have fallen much before. Accident proneness is a slightly controversial area among stair-injury epidemiologists, but it does seem to be a reality. About four persons in ten injured in a stair fall have been injured in a stair fall before.

As many as one-third of all stair accidents occur on the first or last step, and two-thirds occur on the first or last three steps.

A person's lifetime risk of colorectal cancer is about 5 percent, and eating processed meat every day appears to boost a person's absolute risk of cancer by 1 percentage point, to 6 percent (that's 18 percent of the 5 percent lifetime risk).

A heart attack, as one doctor has put it, is "50 percent genetic and 50 percent cheeseburger.

Cadmium, for instance, is the twenty-third most common element in the body, constituting 0.1 percent of your bulk, but it is seriously toxic.

It costs nothing to buckle up and clearly has the potential to save you from exiting through the windscreen like superman.

Would Giovanni da Verrazano think being eaten by cannibals a reasonable price to pay for having his name attached to a toll bridge between Brooklyn and Staten Island? I suspect not.

I looked up—a sheer, flat, white rocky face (the kind you would take a ski lift to reach the top of or wear a parachute to jump from)—and thought: Oh, shit.

If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure.B

make us more powerful and yet more vulnerable at the same time. The greater the power, the greater the vulnerability. You think, rightly so, that you are at the apex of your power, that you can do more things than ever before. But I see you at the peak of your