Bret Stephens Quotes

Never make predictions, especially about the future.

Are the things that now, in retrospect, with what I've seen happen to my company, would I have done some things differently? I think - I think we all would do - we would do a number of things differently.

Tis easy to see, hard to foresee.

All market response results from a reduction of uncertainty.

Using a forecasting company is like going to a fortune-teller. If you believe the company and the color does not sell, who do you blame? The forecasters? No, you blame yourself.

I don't know if I would do this if I had to start over again.

I had always thought of starting my own record company. I haven't regretted the decision - yet!

It's very easy to make certain decisions that affect your life that you have no perspective on.

The true statesman is the one who is willing to take risks.

I think an important lesson from the game is that once you have made a move, you cannot take it back. You really have to measure your decisions. You think a lot. You evaluate your choices very carefully. There's never any guarantee about what's going to follow once you have made a decision.

I think there's a difference between a gamble and a calculated risk.

Life is made up of a series of judgments on insufficient data, and if we waited to run down all our doubts, it would flow past us.

If you play your cards right things are going to happen in the long run. In the short run, it is anybody's guess.

As a first-time CEO, I wasn't sure if I would scale to run IronPort long-term. But I wanted a legitimate shot at it.

We will never have 100 percent certainty except in hindsight.

When I think about the stuff I've turned down or the stuff I wasn't interested in, I don't have any regrets. Yes, there were some movies that went on to be really popular. But now, how do they really fit into things?

I think you regret the things that you don't do more than the things you do.

In many cases, if we knew what it would take, we might have thought twice about it, so it's often wonderful that we don't have hindsight.

There are a lot of parallels between being a mutual fund manager and being a general manager. Both in the financial markets and in baseball, we're dealing with a world where uncertainty reigns. We're trying to predict the future performance of human beings. It's a fundamental difficulty for which we both have to account.

Nobody can really guarantee the future. The best we can do is size up the chances, calculate the risks involved, estimate our ability to deal with them and then make our plans with confidence.

there are risks you'll take for yourself because you know that if your plan goes wrong, it'll be too late for regrets. but if you risk the lives of others and fail, you'll have a lifetime to regret it.

It's all well and good to look back after the fact and see what we should have done, but we rarely know what path is best when we take that first step.

The quest for certainty in forecasting outcomes can be the enemy of progress.

If you can be sure of being right only 55 percent of the time, you can go down to Wall Street and make a million dollars a day. If you can't be sure of being right even 55 percent of the time, why should you tell other people they are wrong?

Usually, I'm pretty good about sorting through the options and then making decisions that I'm confident are the best decisions in that moment, given the information we have. But there are times where I think I wish I could have imagined a different level of insight.