Henry Hazlitt Quotes

As Americans, we shouldn't like bailouts. Where I come from, if someone takes a risk and they're going to make the profit from that risk, they shouldn't have the taxpayer pay for the losses.

If you want to avoid all risks, soon you will have no risks to worry about.

Government is averse to taking risk. Innovation and digital technology is all about risk taking.

Risk is good. Not properly managing your risk is a dangerous leap.

My client loved risk. Risk, I had learned, was a commodity in itself. Risk could be canned and sold like tomatoes.

If you want the most reward you have to take the most risk.

I know many members of our community steer clear of Wall Street because of the perception that the stock market is risky, but I am convinced the biggest risk of all is not taking one.

With government deregulation and the triumph of financial liberalization, the dangers of systemic risks, the possibility of a financial tsunami, sharply increased.

I think one lesson we have to learn is that there's a lot more risk than we're giving credit to, a lot more what economist calls systematic risk.

One role of government is to go where venture capital won't.

The government-sponsored institution Fannie Mae, when I look at its risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup. But not to worry: their large staff of scientists deemed these events "unlikely."

I think risk is important. I don't care if it's a great financial risk or a physical risk. You only get out of something what you put into it and the fact that you are willing to risk something means that you are going to get a lot more out of it.

We're in the business not so much of being contrarians deliberately, but rather we like to take perceived risk instead of actual risk. And what I mean by that is that you get paid for taking a risk that people think is risky, you particularly don't get paid for taking actual risk.

The collateralized debt obligation, the CDO, is a structure which allows you to more or less continuously choose how much risk you want to take in a whole batch of securities. And the reason why they got us into so much trouble is that it's hard to figure out how much risk you really are taking.

It is a mistake to think that one limits one’s risk by spreading too much between enterprises about which one knows little and has no reason for special confidence.

Indeed, better risk management may be the only truly necessary element of success in banking.

See, when the government spends money, it creates jobs; whereas when the money is left in the hands of taxpayers, God only knows what they do with it. Bake it into pies, probably. Anything to avoid creating jobs.

Funded by the government just means funded by the people. Government, by the way, has no money. It only takes money from the people. Sometimes people forget that that's really what occurs.

I think the credit default swaps can take the place of the rating agencies who really have missed the ball in this procedure and are quite conflicted by the way the ratings are paid for. So, I would like to see credit default swaps become an evermore important way of understanding credit risk in the economy.

Risk managers and investment bankers and actually, all kinds of investors took on more risk than they expected. So there was a failure of risk management. There was a failure to recognize how much risk there was in some of these securities that people bought.

It's important to take risks.

It's the investor who is risky, not the investment.

The difference between a calculated risk and rolling the dice can be expressed in one word: homework.

I think we should follow a simple rule: if we can take the worst, take the risk.

Health care is very different from other sectors of the economy in several respects, one of which is the fact that the risk can be very high beyond people's ability. That leads to insurance.