50 Risk Management Quotes: Wisdom for Smart Decision-making

Be inspired to make well-informed decisions, navigate challenges, and seize opportunities with this list of risk management quotes!

From the smallest daily choices to the most significant strategic moves, understanding and embracing risk is crucial for progress and success. Below is a curated list of risk management quotes from renowned leaders, entrepreneurs, and thinkers to help sharpen your decision-making, transform potential pitfalls into opportunities, and cultivate resilience in the face of uncertainty.

(by Jonathan M. Pham)

Short Risk Management Quotes

1. Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing. – Warren Buffett

2. All of life is the management of risk, not its elimination. – Walter Wriston

3. The only people who never tumble are those who never mount the high wire. – Oprah Winfrey

4. Risk management is a more realistic term than safety. – Jerome F. Lederer

5. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity. – Albert Einstein

Short quote for risk management

Motivational Risk Management Quotes

6. If you don’t take risks, you risk everything. – Geena Davis

7. A ship is safe in harbor—but that’s not what ships are for. – William G.T. Shedd

8. When you take risks and they work out, they lead to new capabilities you never saw before. – Tom Soderstrom

9. Progress always involves risk; you can’t steal second base and keep your foot on first. – Frederick Wilcox

10. There are risks and costs to action—but they are far less than the long‑range risks of comfortable inaction. – John F. Kennedy

Famous quote about risk

Quotes About Taking Risks

11. When you aren’t a little not ready to do something—you won’t grow. – Marissa Mayer

12. To win without risk is to triumph without glory. – Pierre Corneille

13. Opportunities, the good ones, they’re messy and confusing and hard to recognize. They’re risky. They challenge you. – Susan Wojcicki

14. What’s the worst thing that would happen if I failed? – Dave Hitz

15. The biggest risk is not taking any risk. – Mark Zuckerberg

Motto of a risk taker

Quotes About Risk and Reward

16. The reward is in the risk. – Rachel Cohn

17. If you don’t go after what you want, you’ll never have it. – Nora Roberts

18. If you want the most reward you have to take the most risk. – Jesse Itzler

19. Business is a risk‑reward proposition. – Bill Bain

20. Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. – T. S. Eliot

Quotes about risk, opportunity and success

Risk Assessment Quotes

21. You need a certain emotional intelligence when approaching risk. – David Hillson

22. Some risks thought unknown are not unknown—foresight and tools can help reveal them. – Daniel Wagner

23. A major lesson in risk management is that a ‘receding sea’ is not free beach but a tsunami warning. – Jos Berkemeijer

24. Thoughtfully assessing and addressing enterprise risk and placing a high value on corporate transparency can protect the one thing we cannot afford to lose: trust. – Dale E. Jones

25. Alignment of strategy and risk appetite should minimize exposure to unexpected losses. – Jerome Powell

Read more: 50 Essential Emotional Intelligence Quotes for Success

Quotes about risk management

Risk Control Quotes

26. Never take both hands off the pump. As an entrepreneur, you need to be on constant lookout for opportunity, and that will involve risk. But you minimize those risks by keeping one hand on the pump that is producing for you. – Kenneth E. Behring

27. Unprecedented events occur regularly—be prepared. – Seth Klarman

28. My mission isn’t to make money—it’s to preserve capital. – Michael Price

29. Large losses are almost always caused by trying to get too much by taking too much risk. – Charles Ellis

30. Not taking risks one doesn’t understand is often the best form of risk management. – Raghuram G. Rajan

Read more: 65 Entrepreneur Quotes – Wisdom to Launch & Lead

Quotes about risk mitigation

Business Risk Quotes

31. If you don’t invest in risk management, it doesn’t matter what business you’re in, it’s a risky business. – Gary Cohn

32. Being a Navy SEAL taught me risk management: reduce variables to acceptable levels. – Brandon Webb

33. Even F1 has the best risk management of any industry. – Jackie Stewart

34. Indeed, better risk management may be the only necessary element of success in banking. – Alan Greenspan

35. Be a business analyst, not a market, macroeconomic, or security analyst. Consider the totality of risk and effect; look always at potential second-order and higher-level impacts. – Charles T. Munger

Read more: 60 Business Strategy Quotes – From Planning to Profit

Quotes about risk in business

Operational Risk Management Quotes

36. Managing risk is very different from managing strategy. – Robert S. Kaplan

37. Risk management is about people and processes—not models and tech. – Trevor Levine

38. Success is about smart risk management, not about wild risk taking. – Michael Masterson

39. We learn from history that people don’t learn from history. – Warren Buffett

40. Operational risk reporting can best support business decision-making if it is prepared to complement rather than mimic other forms of management reporting. – Paul Lowrie

Financial risk quotes

Project Risk Management Quotes

41. Keeping the risk management plan up to date can transform it from a door stop into a vital project management tool. – Bruce Pittman

42. Remember: what you don’t know can kill your project. – Bruce Pittman

43. Never put yourself in a position where you cannot live to fight another day. – Richard S. Fuld Jr.

44. No matter how good the team or how efficient the methodology, if we’re not solving the right problem, the project fails. – Woody Williams

45. Crisis planning and continuous learning maximize organizational ability through risk. – Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.

Quotes on risk

Enterprise Risk Management Quotes

46. Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) involves viewing risk holistically and horizontally across an organization. – Al Decker

47. Risk management should be an enterprise-wide exercise and engrained in the business culture of the organization. – Julie Dickson

48. Total enterprise risk management is critical—but implementing it is easier said than done. – Danny Klinefelter

49. We try to protect against tail risk: the risk of unlikely but possible events that could be catastrophic. – Seth Klarman

50. The essence of risk management lies in maximizing the areas where we have some control over the outcome while minimizing the areas where we have absolutely no control over the outcome. – Peter L. Bernstein

Read more: 110 Leadership Quotes to Unlock Greatness

Quote about courage to take risks

Other resources you might be interested in:

• 125 Management Quotes: Essential Wisdom for Excellence
• 57 Change Management Quotes: Wisdom for Leaders
• 55 Company Culture Quotes: Building a Great Workplace
• 44 Organizational Development Quotes: Spark Change & Drive Momentum