Quotes About Risk

Coastal flooding could wipe out up to 9.3 percent of the world's annual output by 2100 (a Swedish-French-British team in 2015). It could create losses of up to $2.9 trillion in that year (a German-British-Dutch-Belgian team in 2014). It could put as many as a billion people at risk by 2050 (a Dutch team in 2012). Test cases occurred in 2017, when storms inundated Houston, Puerto Rico, and the Florida Keys.

It's hard to kill yourself by taking Tylenol. You die from liver failure, which takes a long time...

Yet Catchings would in just ten years very nearly destroy the firm, proving once again that articulate optimists encouraged by early successes and armed with financial leverage can become hugely destructive.

At least 80 percent of Capital's most important decisions have been 'No' decisions: active, carefully thought-through decisions not to take a specific action. That's why one of the hallmarks of Capital is how seldom it makes major mistakes.

I could show fight on natural selection having done and doing more for the progress of civilization than you seem inclined to admit. Remember what risk the nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago of being overwhelmed by the Turks

Quit puzzling over it. The worst you can do is fail to kill a turkey and there's not a hunter in the world hasn't done that. Go on.

Once completely freed, the bankers very quickly ran their institutions off the cliff, taking much of the global economy with them. Not only did they create and sell a huge amount of junk, but they turned the financial system into a gigantic casino, one in which they played mainly with other people's money.

E. B. White wrote, "No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky."1

One mantra of Silicon Valley, the technological innovation capital of the world, is "fail faster to succeed sooner.

when he has to risk everything on his leap, and in the spiritual domain Jesus Christ demands that you risk everything you hold by common sense and leap into what He says. . . . Trust entirely in God, and when He brings you to the venture, see that you take it. We act like pagans in a crisis, only one out of a crowd is daring enough to bank his faith in the character of God.2

Faith is doing what God tells us to do, even when His instructions appear dangerous or might cause us to experience loss or suffering.

Insurance companies are nothing more than a dumping ground for risk; for an appropriate fee, you can have them assume a risk for you.

But I had fallen among pirates and life insurance underwriters.

As the old saying had it, if you owe the bank ten thousand pounds, you have a problem; if you owe the bank ten million pounds, the bank has a problem; and if you owe the bank ten billion pounds, the Chancellor had a problem.

Yes, Derek," I tell him, "we hauled you four thousand miles out of your comfort zone just so you could make a saving throw vs. Cthulhu. Happy now?

There is cold comfort to be drawn from the sure and certain knowledge that the correct way to deal with the problem you're facing in your job involves napalm, if you find yourself confronting a dragon and you aren't even carrying a cigarette lighter.

Didn't they know that the only unhackable computer is one that's running a secure operating system, welded inside a steel safe, buried under a ton of concrete at the bottom of a coal mine guarded by the SAS and a couple of armoured divisions, and switched off? What did they think they were doing?

Nor can I tell him—lest the SA's command override cause my arterial blood vessels to burst and my eyeballs to catch fire—about Long-Term Continuity Operations and the Resistance.

I feel ill with emotional indigestion: I don't think I've ever felt for Mo the kind of raw, priapic lust I feel for Ramona, but Ramona is a poisonous bloom—off-limits if I value my life.

OF COURSE, SPACE travel isn't only about being stuffed into a claustrophobia-inducing cell, scared witless, trussed up in a restraint harness, and raped through every orifice for years on end. Because, you know, if that was all there was to it, there'd be a queue outside every travel agent.

They're nuts. Completely insane! I don't get this gambling thing. Didn't these people study statistics at university? Evidently not

IF ONE WISHES to live to a ripe old age, there are certain activities one should avoid. Chief among these is eating anything larger than one's own head—but not so very far down the list is any activity that involves clambering around the outside of a spaceship.

Who knows? It's a long shot, but it just might work.

It was one of ours originally, but no human being can sprint around a building with their helmet off and backpack missing in a fimbulwinter cold enough to freeze liquid oxygen.