Quotes About Risk

This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is risky, that it is a bad thing—and that eliminating randomness is done by eliminating randomness.

My dream—the solution—is that we would have a National Entrepreneur Day, with the following message: Most of you will fail, disrespected, impoverished, but we are grateful for the risks you are taking and the sacrifices you are making for the sake of the economic growth of the planet and pulling others out of poverty. You are at the source of our antifragility. Our nation thanks you.

Please, don't drive a school bus blindfolded.

What should we control? As a rule, intervening to limit size (of companies, airports, or sources of pollution), concentration, and speed are beneficial in reducing Black Swan risks.

How do you innovate? First, try to get in trouble. I mean serious, but not terminal, trouble. I hold—it is beyond speculation, rather a conviction—that innovation and sophistication spark from initial situations of necessity, in ways that go far beyond the satisfaction of such necessity (from the unintended side effects of, say, an initial invention or attempt at invention).

anything that has more upside than downside from random events (or certain shocks) is antifragile; the reverse is fragile.

The quality of a decision cannot be solely judged based on its outcome.

A half-man (or, rather, half-person) is not someone who does not have an opinion, just someone who does not take risks for it.

In spite of what is studied in business schools concerning "economies of scale," size hurts you at times of stress; it is not a good idea to be large during difficult times.

Because what matters in life isn't how frequently one is "right" about outcomes, but how much one makes when one is right. Being wrong, when it is not costly, doesn't count—in a way that's similar to trial-and-error mechanisms of research.

Life is sacrifice and risk taking, and nothing that doesn't entail some moderate amount of the former, under the constraint of satisfying the latter, is close to what we can call life. If you do not undertake a risk of real harm, reparable or even potentially irreparable, from an adventure, it is not an adventure.

Not seeing a tsunami or an economic event coming is excusable; building something fragile to them is not.

No, businessmen as risk takers are not subjected to the judgment of other businessmen, only to that of their personal accountant.

If you do not take risks for your opinion, you're nothing.

I've debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man.

Some business bets in which one wins big but infrequently, yet loses small but frequently, are worth making if others are suckers for them and if you have the personal and intellectual stamina.

This high-yield market resembles a nap on a railway track.

Freedom is always associated with risk taking, whether it leads to it or comes from it.

It is much easier to sell "Look what I did for you" than "Look what I avoided for you.

avoidance of small mistakes makes the large ones more severe.

It is the system and its fragility, not events, that must be studied—what

It is also related to a problem called denigration of history, as gamblers, investors, and decision-makers feel that the sorts of things that happen to others would not necessarily happen to them.

our world is dominated by the extreme, the unknown, and the very improbable (improbable according our current knowledge)—and all the while we spend our time engaged in small talk, focusing on the known, and the repeated. This

This idea that in order to make a decision you need to focus on the consequences (which you can know) rather than the probability (which you can't know) is the central idea of uncertainty. Much