Best Risk Management Quotes

The Risk Management Quotes page of Riskviews has consistently been the most popular part of the site.  Since its inception, the page has received almost 2300 hits, more than twice the next most popular part of the site.

The quotes are sometimes actually about risk management, but more often they are statements or questions that risk managers should keep in mind.

They have been gathered from a wide range of sources, and most of the authors of the quotes were not talking about risk management, at least they were not intending to talk about risk management.

The list of quotes has recently hit its 100th posting (with something more than 100 quotes, since a number of the posts have multiple quotes.)  So on that auspicous occasion, here are my favotites:

1. Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.  Douglas Adams
2. “when the map and the territory don’t agree, always believe the territory” Gause and Weinberg – describing Swedish Army Training
3. When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.-Will Rogers
4. “The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair” Douglas Adams
5. “A foreign policy aimed at the achievement of total security is the one thing I can think of that is entirely capable of bringing this country to a point where it will have no security at all.”– George F. Kennan, (1954)
6. “THERE ARE IDIOTS. Look around.” Larry Summers
7. the only virtue of being an aging risk manager is that you have a large collection of your own mistakes that you know not to repeat  Donald Van Deventer
8. Philip K. Dick “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
9. Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.  Albert Einstein
10. “Perhaps when a man has special knowledge and special powers like my own, it rather encourages him to seek a complex explanation when a simpler one is at hand.”  Sherlock Holmes (A. Conan Doyle)
11. The fact that people are full of greed, fear, or folly is predictable. The sequence is not predictable. Warren Buffett
12. “A good rule of thumb is to assume that “everything matters.” Richard Thaler
13. “The technical explanation is that the market-sensitive risk models used by thousands of market participants work on the assumption that each user is the only person using them.”  Avinash Persaud
14. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
    Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
    W Shakespeare Hamlet, scene v
15. When Models turn on, Brains turn off  Til Schuermann

You might have other favorites.  Please let us know about them.

Explore posts in the same categories: Assumptions, Black Swan, Correlation, Emerging Risks, Enterprise Risk Management, ERM, Execution Risk, Financial Crisis, Modeling, Operational Risk, People Risk, Risk, risk assessment, Risk Learning, Risk Management, Tail Risk, Uncertainty, Unknown Risks, Volatility

Tags: Business, Risk Management

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