Management development providers GNP publish a monthly set of handy quotable quotes for use in presentations, speeches or training sessions. Arranged into 100 themes including vision, change, leadership, teamwork, communication, motivation and innovation. TrainingZONE has arranged to bring you the quotes on a regular basis. This month, the theme is risk.
"The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise."
Cornelius Tacitus, Roman historian (55-120 AD)
"People wish to learn to swim, and at the same time keep one foot on the ground."
Marcel Proust, French author (1871-1922)
"People cannot discover new oceans until they lose sight of the shore."
Andre Gide, French novelist, critic (1869-1951)
"Don't play for safety - it's the most dangerous thing in the world."
Horace Walpole, British author (1717-1797)
"And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more."
Erica Jong, US author, poet (b.1942)
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous."
Alfred North Whitehead, British philosopher (1861-1947)
"What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?"
Robert Schuller, US clergyman, author (b.1926)
"There are risks and costs to a programme of action, but they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction."
John F Kennedy, US President (1917-1963)
"If you play safe in life, you've decided that you don't want to grow any more."
Shirley Hufstedler, US lawyer, federal judge (b.1925)
"Be daring, be different, be impractical; be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary."
Sir Cecil Beaton, British photographer (1904-1980)
And finally, Murphy says...
"If the odds are a million to one against something occurring, the chances are 50-50 it will."
Previous quotes from the archive
All quotations drawn from '1000 GREAT QUOTATIONS for Business, Management & Training' published by <a href="http://www.gnp.co.uk"