I am impatient with directors who don't know what they want, and the way you don't know what they want is because they want to do one more. "Let's do one more." So, "What for?" I guarantee you there's not going to be a change.
The policy of being too cautious is the greatest risk of all.
The Englishman is too apt to neglect the present good in preparing against the possible evil.
A dull head thinks of no better way to show himself wise, than by suspecting everything in his way.
If every conceivable precaution is taken at first, one is often too discouraged to proceed at all.
There is nothing that teaches you more than regrouping after failure and moving on. Yet most people are stricken with fear. They fear failure so much that they fail. They are too conditioned, too used to being told what to do. It begins with the family, runs through school and goes into the business world.
If you try and cover all your bases, like the ECB tend to do, you end up with muddled decisions.
The intelligence community, not wanting to be caught napping, tends to over-warn rather than under-warn.
People who are always taking care of their health are like misers, who are hoarding a treasure which they have never spirit enough to enjoy.
Some of us are timid. We think we have something to lose so we don't try for that next hill.
There is nothing more imprudent than excessive prudence.
You can't stop everything from happening. But we've gotten to a point where we're certainly trying. If a car doesn't have four hundred air bags in it, then it's no good.
The way people deal with me - they'll go overboard in trying to be politically correct and make a mess of it. Everyone's so worried about what they're saying to everyone else, that they don't talk very much.
And we wonder what can be that 'philosophy of education' which believes that young people can be trained to the duties of citizenship by wrapping their minds in cotton wool.
There are people who strictly deprive themselves of each and every eatable, drinkable, and smokable which has in any way acquired a shady reputation. They pay this price for health. And health is all they get for it. How strange it is. It is like paying out your whole fortune for a cow that has gone dry.
The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning.
He that is overcautious will accomplish little.
Timidity can be as dangerous as rashness.
The choice is between which mistake is easier to correct: underdoing it or overdoing it.
The cat with gloves catches no mice.
I joke, but only half joke, that if you show up in an American hospital missing a finger, no one will believe you until they get a CAT scan, MRI and orthopedic consult.
Never look for a worm in the apple of your eye.
When the boomers started to have kids reach adolescence, there was suddenly this feeling that they needed to protect their kids from all the same things they did when they were kids. Which I guess is a natural tendency, but it makes for a less fun society.
The chief danger in life is that you may take too many precautions.
The worst advice I ever received from my dad was to play by the book. My old man used to flip out whenever I would try to branch out and do something different. Although he didn't do it on purpose, he really held me back in the beginning.
