Quotes About Uncertainty

I took my last final exam at HBS, the first Friday of May in 1997, and I started Amazon next Monday. No, I didn't know what my job was going to be, or what my title was going to be.

The Sixties are most generously described as a time when people took part - when they stepped out of themselves and acted in public, as people who didn't know what would happen next, but who were sure that acts of true risk and fear would produce something different from what they had been raised to take for granted.

This whole acting thing was always just for me and was always an absolute shot in the dark. If it didn't pan out, I had my hammer and tool belt, banging nails again tomorrow if I had to.

Our long-range predictions - especially those which anticipate extreme-weather events - rely on an assumption that the future will be similar to the past. Lose that, and we lose the tools that have allowed us to prepare for such eventualities.

Rather than say he's an atheist, a friend of mine says, 'I'm a tooth fairy agnostic,' meaning he can't disprove God but thinks God is about as likely as the tooth fairy.

I think that for some time now I have been living with an anxiety which has had no tangible cause. It has been like having a toothache, without the conscientious dentist having been able to find anything wrong with the tooth or with the person as a whole.

Heaven knows where I'll end up - but it's a safe bet that I'll never be at the top of anything! Nor do I particularly care to be.

You can be on top of the world one day and the next day you can go 0-for-4 with four strikeouts.

The conversation topic in my head is not what role I should play; it is whether I am going to play at all.

At NBC I wasn't really sure if the grandparents were going to get my sense of humor on a particular topic.

A president, like a college freshman, can't know in advance which questions he'll have to answer or what topics he'll have to master. He has to be flexible, supple, and responsive. He has to be comfortable with multiple-choice.

It's amazing to me: when people start their career, you write about maybe a couple of topics, and you find that as you grow older, a lot of those topics never resolve, because I think your job as a writer is to pose questions as you see them. I don't know if we're supposed to give answers to people, because I don't know if we have any.

Terrorists are as torn as anyone else.

There is little you can do to stop a tornado, a hurricane, or a cancer diagnosis from changing your life in an instant.

The sprint is sometimes like a toss of a coin. Sometimes it's heads, and sometimes it's tails.

When tempest tossed, embrace chaos.

In every question and every remark tossed back and forth between lovers who have not played out the last fugue, there is one question and it is this: 'Is there someone new?'

At 15, 16, life is being tossed at you.

When you hear the word 'cancer,' it's as if someone took the game of Life and tossed it in the air. All the pieces go flying. The pieces land on a new board. Everything has shifted. You don't know where to start.

To exercise ignorance, racist prejudice, a love of power and total disregard for factual accuracy, one has to inhabit a world where everything can mean anything and nothing is certain.

By my mid-20s, I was a total mess.

I'm usually convinced that what I'm working on is a total disaster.

The intelligence community does not have complete 'eyes on' the totality of the Iranian nuclear program, nor can it guarantee that we have identified all of Iran's nuclear facilities and processes.

We must search out totally new ways to anchor ourselves, for all the old roots religion, nation, community, family, or profession are now shaking under the hurricane impact of the accelerative thrust.