risk

High personal standards aren't enough for organizational excellence. You've got to be intolerant of low standards in others. . . . If you accommodate questionable practices in others who touch your organization, you risk soiling its reputation. Anybody whose hands aren't clean can get the place dirty.

The ethics of excellence require a sense of perspective. Look at the big picture. If you live for the moment, do you mortgage the future? What happens if you put your reputation at risk . . . and lose the bet?

To do an evil act is base. To do a good one without incurring danger, is common enough. But it is part of a good man to do great and noble deeds though he risks everything in doing them.

Every noble acquisition is attended with its risks; he who fears to encounter the one must not expect to obtain the other.

To win without risk is to triumph without glory.

It seems to me that people have vast potential. Most people can do extraordinary things if they have the confidence or take the risks. Yet most people don't. They sit in front of the telly and treat life as if it goes on forever.

Promotion should not be more important than accomplishment, or avoiding instability more important than taking the right risk.

In order to learn you must be prepared to take a risk and tolerate a little randomness in the world.

The Impossible Generalized Man is the critic who believes in loving those unworthy of love as well as those worthy - yet believes this only insofar as no personal risk is entailed. Meaning he loves no one, worthy or no. This is what makes him impossible.

Time Management Tips: The perpetual processing of the same temptation is both dangerous and time-wasting. Cycling and recycling the same temptation (instead of rejecting such blandishment out of hand) is not only to risk one's soul, again and again, but is to bring on fatigue, so that the Adversary may be able to do indirectly what we will not let him do directly. A lack of decisiveness in dealing with temptation ties up our thought processes and prevents us from doing good with the time allotted to us.