Quotes About Risk

Option 1: Attempt to back out. Probable result: Death after painful torture. Option 2: Do the job and hope. Probable result: Death but probably no torture (good)

You don't fear me, he said now. She wasn't stupid enough to lie. I'm petrified. But I figure you didn't make me come all this way just so you could push me off the roof.

This was the kind of job that made legends out of hunters. Of course, to be a legend, you generally had to be dead.

It was better to take a chance on the devil she didn't know than to leave herself completely unprotected against the man who (despite his recent assurances of devotion) had made it his business to torment her in the past.

It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. —Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

Life is a gamble and sometimes when you gamble you win.

Climate change has never received the crisis treatment from our leaders, despite the fact that it carries the risk of destroying lives on a vastly greater scale than collapsed banks or collapsed buildings.

From the perspective of a fossil fuel company, going after these high-risk carbon deposits is not a matter of choice—it is its fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, who insist on earning the same kinds of mega-profits next year as they did this year and last year. And yet fulfilling that fiduciary responsibility virtually guarantees that the planet will cook.

have such complete understanding and command over nature that we can radically manipulate and reengineer it with minimal risk to the natural systems that sustain us.

our culture's excruciatingly dangerous claim to have such complete understanding and command over nature that we can radically manipulate and reengineer it with minimal risk to the natural systems that sustain us.

This blitzkrieg strategy is actually quite high-risk. The danger of starting fights on so many fronts is that if it doesn't succeed in demoralizing your opponents, it could very well unite them.

This Gulf Coast crisis is about many things: corruption, deregulation, the addiction to fossil fuels. But underneath it all, it's about this: our culture's excruciatingly dangerous claim to have such complete understanding and command over nature that we can radically manipulate and reengineer it with minimal risk to the natural systems that sustain us.

Success excuses all risks.

One man can go where a group cannot, and manage on very little, particularly a rough adventurer such as he. More the point, he risks only himself when he goes: you much consider that in your charge is an inexpressibly valuable dragon, whose loss must be of greater importance than even this mission. Oh, pray, let us be gone at once, said the inexpressibly valuable dragon, when Laurence had carried the question, still unresolved, back to him. It sounds very exciting to me.

I'm not going to play it safe if you say yes, and I'm not going to do anything dumb if you say no." "What you mean is, you'll do an enormous number of truly stupid things no matter what!

We all have to gamble with our lives in here, we don't get a choice about that; the trick is figuring out when it's worth taking a bet.

Dragon intelligence was a mystery to men who made a study of the subject; he had no idea how much the dragon would hear or understand, but thought it better to avoid the risk of giving offense.

Als bungeejumpen van de hoogste klif ter wereld je geweldig lijkt, zou je dit ook fantastisch vinden. Ik vond het persoonlijk niks.

Lots of us up for first run today," Alfie said, in the bright sort of way that someone might say, Well, looks like rain, doesn't it! when it's sheeting down and you've taken shelter under an awning with five people who've all got knives drawn, and you're quietly reaching into your pocket for a handgun.

Any of them could have a disaster before the school year is over. You could have a disaster an hour from now. Bending over. Something could hit you. People carry guns in glove compartments and lunch boxes. Cars spin out of control in minor drizzle. The more you know, really, the more you have to worry and fret about. It's a miracle anyone can sleep at all.

And I wondered why there were no studies of communities that did not "lock down" — communities in which people chose their own levels of risk while providing support to those who wished to "isolate" or who wanted to protect their own, more vulnerable immune systems while others made different choices. I wondered why no one wanted to know what was becoming of them.

No matter how "right on" the upper-middle class was, no matter the social-justice proclamations of my former liberal, affluent urban "tribe," no one really expressed any objection to this unequal distribution of risk and harm.

Because of this mysterious virus from China, Broadway was closing.33 All of Broadway. Not just one theater or ten theaters, as in a free society in which business owners make choices based on individual risk. All of Broadway, in one iconic, sweeping, Soviet-style, top-down gesture.

that when a man really desires a thing so deeply that he is willing to stake his entire future on a single turn of the wheel in order to get it, he is sure to win.