Ian Hacking Quotes

When something looks really risky from the outside, what people are doing on the inside - they're not professional risk takers. But they're probably professional risk mitigators.

You can never protect yourself 100%. What you do is protect yourself as much as possible and mitigate risk to an acceptable degree. You can never remove all risk.

Neither science, nor the politics in power, nor the mass media, nor business, nor the law nor even the military are in a position to define or control risks rationally.

We live in a world where there are many risks, and it's high time we start taking seriously which ones we should be worried about.

I think we need to think beyond the issue of absolute risk.

There is no elimination of all risks.

I seek as much as I can to mitigate risk.

I like to control the risk I take. And when risk is taken out of my hands, it frustrates me.

In business, you try to minimise risk.

When I take a risk, I like it to be a calculated risk, meaning I make it as small as possible.

None of us live in a zero-risk world.

The advantage of knowing about risks is that we can change our behavior to avoid them. Of course, it is easily observed that to avoid all risks would be impossible; it might entail no flying, no driving, no walking, eating and drinking only healthy foods, and never being touched by sunshine. Even a bath could be dangerous.

Our risk systems and processes - we keep investing and improving them.

It is not the manager's job to prevent risks. It is the manager's job to make it safe to take them.

I think people overestimate the risk of high-risk projects.

The best approach to risk is to identify and manage it.

Keeping the risk management plan up to date can transform it from a door stop into a vital project management tool. Remember: what you don't know can kill your project.

However much risk we are taking, we can and probably should take more.

The most effective leaders are actually better at guarding against danger when they acknowledge it that it exists. Cowards, in contrast, cling to the hope that failure will never happen and may be sloppy in the face of danger - not because they don't acknowledge that it exists, but because they are just too afraid of it to look it in the eye.

Every business and every product has risks. You can't get around it.

The risks are 'How country can you go?' rather than 'How rock can you take it?'

The definition of 'safe' is not strictly an engineering term; it's a societal term. Does it mean absolutely no loss of life? Does it mean absolutely no contamination with radiation? What exactly does 'safe' mean?

If you have something at risk, you think differently.

Everything in life has some risk, and what you have to actually learn to do is how to navigate it.

In the U.S.A. or Europe there is no realistic way to estimate the type, magnitude, or probability of the risk, nor any way to narrow down the potentially affected regions.