Quotes About Risk

Everything – the entire 400-megabuck investment, ten years of Company black operations – depends on what happens in the next few hours.

Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line, dudes.

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

Rule Number One is don't die. Corollary Number One is don't poke things that will certainly kill you, like high-tension cables and hostile level-six Existential Anthropic Threats.

I'm going flat out at maybe a hundred and fifty kilometers per hour on the autobahn while some joker is shooting at me from behind with a cannon that fires Porsches and Mercedes.

Rita stopped, suddenly acutely aware that while curiosity was her job, too much curiosity was reputedly felicidal:

The IT worker has to know in their bones that if they make a mistake, things can go horribly wrong. Tension and cynicism are constant companions, along with camaraderie and competitiveness. It's a lot like being a spy, or necromancer. You don't get out much, and when you do it's usually at night.

Moral of story: if you are a flesh-eating monster, do not let the chattering monkey insert a bang-stick in your mouth while you're trying to snack down on its brains. Seriously, no good will come of this.

There's a fire on the hillside just above Skyland and it's like to go wild if we

The competition could offer a free pass from the risk of having their heads added to the PM's decorative sculpture—or skullpture?—at Marble Arch. Whatever else you could say about His Dread Majesty, he didn't generally execute his servants unless they really fucked up.

Courage will keep her safer than fear.

Politics could be cruel and heartless. And I was afraid, with the tensions in Ireland, that it could also be deadly.

took a deep breath. In for a penny, in for a pound .

I dared not make a mistake…

Fire, knives, automobiles, hair removal cream. Each of these things serves an important purpose. Each one makes our lives better. And each one can cause some serious problems when abused. Now you can add statistics to that list.

The [Value at Risk model] was like a faulty speedometer, which is arguably worse than no speedometer at all. If you place too much faith in the broken speedometer, you will be oblivious to other signs that your speed is unsafe. In contrast, if there is no speedometer at all, you have no choice but to look around for clues as to how fast you are really going.

A Random Walk Down Wall Street.

Os maiores riscos nunca são aqueles que você pode ver e mensurar, mas aqueles que você não pode ver e, portanto, jamais poderá mensurar. Aqueles que parecem tão distantes, fora das fronteiras da probabilidade normal, que você não consegue nem imaginar que possam acontecer na sua vida – mesmo que, é claro, aconteçam, com mais frequência do que você se dá conta.

Stronger regulation and supervision aimed at problems with underwriting practices and lenders' risk management would have been a more effective and surgical approach to constraining the housing bubble than a general increase in interest rates.

were a lot of bad actors). Let's start at the bottom: too many people borrowed too much money to buy real estate.

The typical real estate purchase was far more leveraged than the stocks purchased on margin in the run up to the 1929 crash. Putting 5 percent down on a house means the other 95 percent is borrowed.

Your condo loan might be packaged with 999 other mortgages and sold off to an investor who wanted to receive the steady stream of income as those mortgages were (hopefully) paid off.

The ratings agencies were supposed to be the ones who made sense of this process by evaluating individual securities and assigning them a rating based on their relative risk: AAA, AA, BBB, and so on.

I won $2 playing the lotto today. And I might win $2 again tomorrow. But if I buy thousands of $1 lottery tickets, each with an expected payout of $.56, then it becomes a near mathematical certainty that I will lose money.