A Margin Quotes & Sayings

I love seeing the bookshops and meeting the booksellers
booksellers really are a special breed. No one in their right mind would take up clerking in a bookstore for the salary, and no one in his right mind would want to own one
the margin of profit is too small. So, it has to be a love of readers and reading that makes them do it
along with first dibs on the new books. — Mary Ann Shaffer

To muse for long unwearied hours with my attention riveted to some frivolous device upon the margin, or in the typography of a book - to become absorbed for the better part of a summer's day in a quaint shadow falling aslant upon the tapestry, or upon the floor - to lose myself for an entire night in watching the steady flame of a lamp, or the embers of a fire - to dream away whole days over the perfume of a flower - to repeat monotonously some common word, until the sound, by dint of frequent repetition, ceased to convey any idea whatever to the mind - to lose all sense of motion or physical existence in a state of absolute bodily quiescence long and obstinately persevered in - Such were a few of the most common and least pernicious vagaries induced by a condition of the mental faculties, not, indeed, altogether unparalleled, but certainly bidding defiance to any thing like analysis or explanation. — Edgar Allan Poe

Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self. — George Eliot

Be precise. A lack of precision is dangerous when the margin of error is small. — Donald Rumsfeld

Chris Christie won by such a wide margin that pundits say this will give him the impetus he needs to run for president. And he's got a new slogan: 'Put the oval in the Oval Office.' — Jay Leno

As a writer, I had learned a lot on 'Margin Call' about embracing the weaknesses of a narrative and of a project. A story always has an inherent narrative weakness. — J. C. Chandor

You must not know too much or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and watercraft; a certain free-margin , or even vagueness - ignorance, credulity - helps your enjoyment of these things. — Walt Whitman

Traditional media brand advertising is 65% to 70% spend; online, it's like 28%. You've got a huge margin. — Ross Levinsohn

Life, then will, always contain an inevitable surplus, a margin of the gratuitous, a realm in which there is always more than we need: more things, more impressions, more memories, more habits, more words, more happiness, more unhappiness. — James Wood

I was playing rugby and the other games English school children do, and there was an event in which races were run, and I won these by a considerable margin. — Roger Bannister

Margins on other sales and revenues grew as a result of the growth in extended service plan revenues, which have no associated cost of sales, and the growth in our service margin, reflecting improved overhead expense absorption. — Austin Ligon

It's extremely hard for athletes to accept what's happened to them sometimes. It's hard to be beaten by a small margin, and I've spoken with athletes who, for years afterward, have been tormented by the knowledge that, had they done something ever so slightly different, they could have been one-ten-thousandth of a second quicker. — Chris Cleave

As a matter of fact I trade in accordance to my means and always leave myself an ample margin of safety. — Edwin Lefevre

Before the general use of these instruments of precision in time, there was a wider margin for all appointments; a longer period was required and prepared for, especially in travelling--- coaches of the olden period were not expected to start like steamers or trains, on the instant--- men judged of the time by probabilities, by looking at the sun, and needed not, as a rule, to be nervous about the loss of a moment, and had incomparable fewer experiences wherein a delay of a few minutes might destroy the hopes of a lifetime. A nervous man cannot take out his watch and look at it when the time for an appointment or train is near, without affecting his pulse, and the effect on that pulse, if we could but measure and weigh it, would be found to be correlated to a loss to the nervous system. — George Miller Beard

Shakespeare is getting flyblown; a paternal government might well forbid writing about him, as they put his monument at Stratford beyond the reach of scribbling fingers. With all this buzz of criticism about, one may hazard one's conjectures privately, make one's notes in the margin; but, knowing that someone has said it before, or said it better, the zest is gone. Illness, it its kingly sublimity, sweeps all that aside and leaves nothing but Shakespeare and oneself. — Virginia Woolf

I think that Microsoft will increasingly feel margin pressure from Linux as well as people saying: well actually the applications that really matter to me are not on my PC. And so they're going to be able to extract less of a monopoly rent, so to speak. — Tim O'Reilly

I am constantly swimming on the margin, neither 100% American, French, nor Lebanese. I am none of those. I am the result of those three. Sometimes it's an asset: no one can put you in a category. That I do not make typical Lebanese, European or American films does not bother me. — Ziad Doueiri

For instance, you can't buy e-books through the Kindle app on your iPhone because Apple takes 30% of app-driven sales - a cut that would hurt Amazon's already razor-thin margin. — Anonymous

He threads a hook, re-sews his mouth, cuts off the thread-tails with the razor blade. It's a simple task, no more difficult than shaving. He can do it in the dark. He can do it in a thirty-knot wind and seven-foot seas. He can do it in his sleep, and he probably has.
(Margin note in reference to excerpt above "Per Dr. B: it's easy to get used to doing things that are harmful to ourselves- do it often enough + it becomes ordinary/habitual- just how you live. — Doug Dorst

Blah, blah, blah, regret to inform you that DI Gray has tendered his resignation; blah, blah, blah; opportunity to reward performance; blah, blah, blah; suggestions by next Wednesday.

McPherson had scribbled, "BEATTIE?" in the margin in red biro.

Idiot.

Logan stuck the memo back in the drawer. Detective Sergeant Beattie couldn't arrest his own backside with three patrol cars and a search warrant. — Stuart MacBride

Lincoln's reference to government of the people, by the people, for the people is a generally satisfactory definition of democracy. I say generally because when it comes to fair and workable details, democracy fails to completely meet the criteria enunciated by Lincoln by a rather wide margin. — George Aiken

Inflation, especially a slow steady rise in prices, encourages producers, because it means that they can commit themselves to costs of production on one price level and then, later, offer the finished product for sale at a somewhat higher price level. This situation encourages production because it gives confidence of an almost certain profit margin. — Carroll Quigley

If you understood a business perfectly and the future of the business, you need very little in the way of a margin of safety. — Warren Buffett

To Steve, these stores were pulling off something he had never been able to manage: they sold a lifestyle product at an absurdly high margin by presenting it in a beautiful and yet informative way. — Brent Schlender

The biggest thing, I think, is to stay healthy and make the fewest mistakes, and then you can win ... The margin of error is so small in the NFL, so if you can do those two things - keep your team healthy and make the fewest mistakes each Sunday - you have a good chance of going to the Super Bowl. — Hugh Douglas

Resignation to misfortune is the only attitude, but not an easy one to adopt. It seems undeserved where plans were well laid and so nearly crowned with a first success. I cannot see that any plan would be altered if it were to do again, the margin for bad weather was ample according to all experience and this stormy December - our finest month - is a thing that the most cautious organiser might not have been prepared to encounter. It is very evil to lie here in a wet sleeping-bag and think of the pity of it all. — Robert Falcon Scott

All I'm saying is, technology can potentially do better than nature because of the very fact that it's not always a matter of life or death. If an organism has been fine-tuned to maximize its overall reproductive success, that's not the same thing as embodying the ideal solution to every individual problem it faces. Evolution appears inventive to us because it's had time to try so many possibilities, but it has no margin at all for real risks, let alone anything truly whimsical. We can celebrate our own beautiful mistakes. All evolution can do is murder them. — Greg Egan

In order to grow at this pace, there will have to be a couple of acquisitions along the way. The tricky thing is to grow at this rate and maintain a 40 percent operating margin. — Larry Ellison

In any story, drama may be intensified by the characters realizing by how narrow a margin they had managed to succeed - that is, where coincidence played a role. This is one of the more realistic ways to use coincidence because rarely do we realize how important a coincidental event is until after the fact. — Jane Lindskold

One other thing struck me. The margin between life and death was so very slim in Darfur, where people eked out a harsh semi-desert existence. The ability to cope was that much more limited than it had been in, say, Rwanda, a relatively fertile tropical country. Consequently, the ability to destroy people's means of livelihood was that much greater. — Mukesh Kapila

Everything stated or expressed by man is a note in the margin of a completely erased text. From what's in the note we can extract the gist of what must have been in the text, but there's always a doubt, and the possible meanings are many. — Fernando Pessoa

The encrusted religious structure is not changed by its institutional dependents--they are part of the crust. It is changed by one who goes alone to the wilderness, where he fasts and prays, and returns with cleansed vision. In going alone, he goes independent of institutions, forswearing orthodoxy ("right opinion"). In going to the wilderness he goes to the margin, where he is surrounded by the possibilities--by no means all good--that orthodoxy has excluded. By fasting he disengages his thoughts from the immediate issues of livelihood; his willing hunger takes his mind off the payroll, so to speak. And by praying he acknowledges ignorance; the orthodox presume to know, whereas the marginal person is trying to find out. He returns to the community, not necessarily with new truth, but with a new vision of the truth; he sees it more whole than before. — Wendell Berry

The difference between the price we pay for a stock and its liquidation value gives us a margin of safety. This kind of investing is one of the most effective ways of achieving good long term results. — Peter Cundill

I think of what it means to be a teenager in America, necessarily pushing boundaries, making expected mistakes. Here there is no margin for error: a mistake, no matter how insignificant, dashes any small hopes to break the cycle of poverty. Here in Kibera the world is relentless and unforgiving. — Jessica Posner

It is impossible to separate any power except a square into 2 powers with the same exponent. I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which however the margin is not large enough to contain — Pierre De Fermat

There is a close logical connection between the concept of a safety margin and the principle of diversification. — Benjamin Graham

I find myself at the extremity of a long beach. How gladly does the spirit leap forth, and suddenly enlarge its sense of being to the full extent of the broad, blue, sunny deep! A greeting and a homage to the Sea! I descend over its margin, and dip my hand into the wave that meets me, and bathe my brow. That far-resounding roar is the Ocean's voice of welcome. His salt breath brings a blessing along with it — Nathaniel Hawthorne

Expert estimates of probability are often off by factors of hundreds or
thousands. [ ... ] I used to be annoyed when the margin of error was high in
a forecasting model that I might put together. Now I view it as perhaps the
single most important piece of information that a forecaster provides. When
we publish a forecast on FiveThirtyEight, I go to great lengths to document
the uncertainty attached to it, even if the uncertainty is sufficiently
large that the forecast won't make for punchy headlines. — Nate Silver

The claim of fine tuning is subjective. As I stated before, no measurement in physics is perfect. The amount of precision we demand can be increased or decreased at our whim. We could have an approximate measurement that has a huge margin of error and call it finely-tuned if we so desire. Theists, in particular, have a lot of such desire. They so badly want God to be an indispensable part of our universe's creation, so they see finely-tuned constants.
They also tend to sweep under the rug the following fact: the vast majority of our universe is hostile to life, and they fail to consider that another hand in the proverbial deck might yield a better universe than ours, one teaming with life on every planet throughout the cosmos. — G.M. Jackson

I remember coming on my first set and it being a playground of things I wanted to ask questions about: cameras and lenses and what the lenses do, what's the focus puller doing and how does that work? Why is there less margin for error when there's less light? I was always asking questions and watching directors closely. — Paul Bettany

It is time for us to breathe and build margin into our lives for God. Sabbath was intended as a gift, and it is still a gift to us today. If you are weary, worn out, and exhausted the concept of Sabbath will change your life. — Priscilla Shirer

To divide a cube into two other cubes, a fourth power, or in general any power whatever into two powers of the same denomination above the second is impossible, and I have assuredly found an admirable proof of this, but the margin is too narrow to contain it. — Pierre De Fermat

When Charles Darwin was trying to decide whether he should propose to his cousin Emma Wedgwood, he got out a pencil and paper and weighed every possible consequence. In favor of marriage he listed children, companionship, and the 'charms of music and female chit-chat.' Against marriage he listed the 'terrible loss of time,' lack of freedom to go where he wished, the burden of visiting relatives, the expense and anxiety provoked by children, the concern that 'perhaps my wife won't like London,' and having less money to spend on books. Weighing one column against the other produced a narrow margin of victory, and at the bottom Darwin scrawled, 'Marry - Marry - Marry Q.E.D.' Quod erat demonstrandum, the mathematical sign-off that Darwin himself restated in English: 'It being proved necessary to Marry. — Brian Christian

Touch is more important than arm strength. You want to really allow the receiver to run underneath the throw. It'll give you a little margin for error if you undershoot it a bit. — Aaron Rodgers

It is impossible to separate a cube into two cubes, or a fourth power into two fourth powers, or in general, any power higher than the second, into two like powers. I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
[Cubum autem in duos cubos, aut quadratoquadratum in duos quadratoquadratos & generaliter nullam in infinitum ultra quadratum potestatem in duos eiusdem nominis fas est dividere cuius rei demonstrationem mirabilem sane detexi. Hanc marginis exiguitas non caperet.] — Pierre De Fermat

To move along the line of natural expectation consolidates the opponent's balance and thus increases his resisting power. In war, as in wrestling, the attempt to throw the opponent without loosening his foothold and upsetting his balance results in self-exhaustion, increasing in disproportionate ratio to the effective strain put upon him. Success by such a method only becomes possible through an immense margin of superior strength in some form-and, even so, tends to lose decisiveness. In most campaigns the dislocation of the enemy's psychological and physical balance has been the vital prelude to a successful attempt at his overthrow. — B.H. Liddell Hart

It is a mere illusion that, above a certain income, the personal desires will be satisfied and leave a wider margin for the generous impulse. — Robert Louis Stevenson

I stand among you as one who offers a small message of hope ... there are always people who dare to seek on the margin of society, who are not dependent on social acceptance, not dependent on social routine, and prefer a kind of free-floating existence under a state of risk. — Thomas Merton

A nationwide Harris Poll showed that the public favoured the use of Laetrile by a 30% margin ... In over 250 cases of cancer with which I have been associated, all of whom used (Laetrile, vitamin) B-17, not a single one had side effects as a result ... — Leon Chaitow

We're a high-volume, low-margin business, so we decided to reinvent our own approach to health care. — Steven Burd

I want to go home. Then he mentally underlined the last sentence three times, rewrote it in huge letters in red ink, and circled it before putting a number of exclamation marks next to it in his mental margin. — Neil Gaiman

Not every illness can be overcome. But many people allow illness to disfigure their lives more than it should. They cave in needlessly. They ignore and weaken whatever powers they have for standing erect. There is always a margin within which life can be lived with meaning and even with a certain measure of joy, despite illness. — Norman Cousins

Bernanke and company are trying to reflate the economy with almost stated objective of inflation at 2 percent and higher in order to provide some type of safety margin for a future recession. That's where they want to go. — Bill Gross

A margin of safety is achieved when securities are purchased at prices sufficiently below underlying value to allow for human error, bad luck, or extreme volatility in a complex, unpredictable and rapidly changing world. — Seth Klarman

Investors frequently benefit from making decisions with less than perfect knowledge and are well rewarded for bearing the risk of uncertainty. The time other investors spend delving into the last unanswered detail may cost them the chance to buy into situations at prices so low they offer a margin of safety despite the incomplete information — Seth Klarman

[T]he term 'nonhuman' grates on me, since it lumps millions of species together by an absence, as if they were missing something. Poor things, they are nonhuman! When students embrace this jargon in their writing, I cannot resist sarcastic corrections in the margin saying that for completeness's sake, they should add that the animals they are talking about are also nonpenguin, nonhyena, and a whole lot more. — Frans De Waal

I am still a lover of paper books. One of my first jobs was in a bookstore, and I still like to be able to write in a margin and feel the paper. Once inside of a digital device, I end up losing things. — Sophia Amoruso

If Jim Mora loses his job with the Falcons, it most likely will be because of wins and losses. Problem is, when you work for such an image-conscious owner and in the most fickle of sports towns, random acts of dumbness tend to shrink a guy's margin for error. — Jeff Schultz

True economy consists in always making the income exceed the out-go. Wear the old clothes a little longer if necessary; dispense with the new pair of gloves; mend the old dress: live on plainer food if need be; so that, under all circumstances, unless some unforeseen accident occurs, there will be a margin in favor of the income. — P.T. Barnum

In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important. — Luis Bunuel

There are only a few things investors can do to counteract risk: diversify adequately, hedge when appropriate, and invest with a margin of safety. It is a precisely because we do not and cannot know all the risks of an investment that we strive to invest at a discount. The bargain element helps to provide a cushion for when things go wrong. — Seth Klarman

What entrepreneurs quickly learn is that they need to price their product at least 2.3 times its cost to allow for at least one 50 percent margin for them and another 50 percent margin for their retailers (1.5 x 1.5 = 2.25). That first 50 percent margin for the entrepreneur is really mostly covering the hidden costs of doing business at a scale that they hadn't thought of when they first started, — Chris Anderson

As I saw myself moving ever farther toward the social margin, nothing healed me of a sore and angry heart like a walk through the city. To see in the street the fifty different ways people struggle to remain human - the variety and inventiveness of survival techniques - was to feel the pressure relieved, the overflow draining off. I felt in my nerve endings the common refusal to go under. — Vivian Gornick

You shall see them on a beautiful quarto page where a neat rivulet of text shall meander through a meadow of margin. — Richard Brinsley Sheridan

By a sizable margin, walking, especially when the athletes landed first with their heels, was the most economical way for human beings to move. — Gretchen Reynolds

Proper accounting is like engineering. You need a margin of safety. Thank God we don't design bridges and airplanes the way we do accounting. — Charlie Munger

I forget what the relevant American rate is, but I can tell you that our goal is to have a combined federal-provincial corporate tax rate of no more than 25 percent. We're on target to do that by 2012. We will have significantly - by a significant margin the lowest corporate tax rates in the G-7, and that's our - our government's objective. — Stephen Harper

The vital point to remember is that the swine who just sent your pearl of a story back with nothing but a coffee-stain and a printed rejection slip can be wrong. You cannot take it for granted that he is wrong, but you have an all-important margin of hope that might be enough to keep you going. — Brian Stableford

There are several things that can create an alpha - stock buybacks are one. High dividend yields are another, especially nowadays because the stock market yields more than the banks and the tenure treasury. But by and large, it tends to be companies with a strong cash flow, rising sales, accelerated earnings, a profit margin expansion. — Louis Navellier

When you take a look at the transition from server software to Azure, what's going on in terms of cloud infrastructure, the company is absolutely the No. 1 company serving enterprise backbone needs, which is fantastic. It's making the migration to cloud. We started a good thing with Azure, and the company has made well more than two years of progress in terms of being able to compete with the right cost profile, margin structure, and innovation versus Amazon. — Steve Ballmer

I trust that McDonald's can find a way to sell all-natural chicken without raising their prices; we did that at Shake Shack. It is more expensive, and we took a slight margin hit, but we did it. And if we can do it, I know that much bigger companies can. — Danny Meyer

Of course, to a true geek, the glass is neither half-full nor half-empty. It's twice as big as it currently needs to be, though a reasonable reserve margin is not a bad thing to have ready, just in case. — David S. Platt

Nowadays theologians aren't quite so straightforward as Paley. They don't point to complex living mechanisms and say that they are self-evidently designed by a creator, just like a watch. But there is a tendency to point to them and say 'It is impossible to believe' that such complexity, or such perfection, could have evolved by natural selection. Whenever I read such a remark, I always feel like writing 'Speak for yourself' in the margin. — Richard Dawkins

You're always working at the margin of what you don't understand, that's the only exhilarating place to be. To just illustrate what you already know is condescending, and a waste of your time. — Emmet Gowin

Being under the microscope meant I was never given any slack. I still managed to screw up plenty in life, mind you, but in the things I really cared about - the legal work, or the stories I was telling as a writer, or the office I built in government - I wasn't left a lot of margin for error. It's kept me driven. — Ronan Farrow

Fred, in the light from the window above, looked for a moment like a newly hatched chick, with his twitchy little head and blinking dark eyes and face open to the world. Birdie felt something like fear then, something ragged and dark lurking just out of sight. Fred could die just like Eleanor did, just like the Wallace boy who'd gone to bed with a headache and died in the night when a blood vessel exploded in his brain. The slimmest margin separated life from not-life. Pastor Hardy boomed on and on. "We must be overcomers — Rae Meadows

Give two cooks the same ingredients and the same recipe; it is fascinating to observe how, like handwriting, their results differ. After you cook a dish repeatedly, you begin to understand it. Then you can reinvent it a bit and make it yours. A written recipe can be useful, but sometimes the notes scribbled in the margin are the key to a superlative rendition. Each new version may inspire improvisation based on fresh understanding. It doesn't have to be as dramatic as all that, but such exciting minor epiphanies keep cooking lively. — David Tanis

I don't want to go to Washington to be a co-sponsor of some bland little bill nobody cares about. I don't want to go to Washington to get my name on something that makes small change at the margin. — Elizabeth Warren

[Clayton] Christensen had seen dozens of companies falter by going for immediate payoffs rather than long-term growth, and he saw people do the same thing. In three hours at work, you could get something substantial accomplished, and if you failed to accomplish it you felt the pain right away. If you spent three hours at home with your family, it felt like you hadn't done a thing, and if you skipped it nothing happened. So you spent more and more time at the office, on high-margin, quick-yield tasks, and you even believed that you were staying away from home for the sake of your family. He had seen many people tell themselves that they could divide their lives into stages, spending the first part pushing forward their careers, and imagining that at some future point they would spend time with their families
only to find that by then their families were gone. — Larissa MacFarquhar

Being kidnapped and abused by the undead was worse than calculus, but not by a wide margin. — Thomm Quackenbush

A minuscule 4 percent of funds produce market-beating after-tax results with a scant 0.6 percent (annual) margin of gain. The 96 percent of funds that fail to meet or beat the Vanguard 500 Index Fund lose by a wealth-destroying margin of 4.8 percent per annum. — David F. Swensen

Some men learn all they know from books; others from life; both kinds are narrow. The first are all theory; the second are all practice. It's the fellow who knows enough about practice to test his theories for blow-holes that gives the world a shove ahead, and finds a fair margin of profit in shoving it. — George Horace Lorimer

A first-rate organizer is never in a hurry. He is never late. He always keeps up his sleeve a margin for the unexpected. — Arnold Bennett

With a chip on his shoulder larger than his margin of victory, Barack Obama is approaching his second term by replicating the mistake of his first. Then his overreaching involved health care - expanding the entitlement state at the expense of economic growth. Now he seeks another surge of statism, enlarging the portion of gross domestic product grasped by government and dispensed by politics. The occasion is the misnamed 'fiscal cliff,' the proper name for which is: the Democratic Party's agenda. — George Will

Then it was she saw him again. On the upper reaches of the scaffolding, a sheerness of presence, no more. It was as if he took the space from the air about him and against the darkness was etched, like the brightness which seeps through a door ajar, hinting at nameless, fathomless brilliances beyond, the slightest margin of light. Impossible to look too closely, but some way below, beneath where the long feet might have rested, she made out the girl's huddled shape, her arms folded over her head like some small broken-winged, storm-tossed bird. — Salley Vickers

The people of the Third World need our sympathetic understanding and, much more than that, they need our help. We can provide them with a margin of survival by internal disruption in the United States. Whether they can succeed against the kind of brutality we impose on them depends in large part on what happens here. — Noam Chomsky

The point of simple living, for me has got to be:
A soft place to land
A wide margin of error
Room to breathe
Lots of places to find baseline happiness in each and every day — Leo Babauta

One of the dangers about net-net investing is that if you buy a net-net that begins to lose money your net-net goes down and your capacity to be able to make a profit becomes less secure. So the trick is not necessarily to predict what the earnings are going to be but to have a clear conviction that the company isn't going bust and that your margin of safety will remain intact over time. — Peter Cundill

1. Keep speculation and investments separate.
2. Don't be fooled by a name.
3. Be wary of new promotions.
4. Give due consideration to market ability.
5. Don't buy without proper facts.
6. Safeguard purchases through diversification.
7. Don't try to diversify by buying different securities of the same company.
8. Small companies should be carefully scrutinized.
9. Buy adequate security, not super abundance.
10. Choose your dealer and buy outright. (Babson abhorred any type of margin or installment payment plans and, in fact, claimed he never borrowed money.) — Kenneth L. Fisher

Let's talk about rape for a moment. Rape is not what George Lucas did to your childhood. Rape is not what happens when a sports team beats another sports team by a wide margin. Rape is not what happens when your electric bill is higher this month than it was last month. Rape is when a person violates another person in the most despicable, degrading way imaginable and among the myriad of terrible things humans can do to one another, rape is among the worst. I think the casual misappropriation of the concept of rape extending all the way to its widespread comical usage is disgusting even by Internet standards. Off my chest. — Jeffrey Rowland

But each one of us is guilty insofar as he remained inactive. The guilt of passivity is different. Impotence excuses; no moral law demands a spectacular death. Plato already deemed it a matter of course to go into hiding in desperate times of calamity, and to survive. But passivity knows itself morally guilty of every failure, every neglect to act whenever possible, to shield the imperiled, to relieve wrong, to countervail. Impotent submission always left a margin of activity which, though not without risk, could still be cautiously effective. Its anxious omission weighs upon the individual as moral guilt. Blindness for the misfortune of others, lack of imagination of the heart, inner differences toward the witnessed evil
that is moral guilt. — Karl Jaspers

There is also a psychological phenomenon at work here that I believe is particularly male. A woman or girl
presuming one could be induced to take part in this sort of activity in the first place
having burned her hair and eyebrows would conclude that she had been lucky and reduce the amount of gas she put into the balloon next time. The man doesn't come to the same conclusion at all. He, singed and blackened, arrives at the point of view that he still has a margin of error to play with. After all, he isn't dead, and he's hardly likely to burn his eyebrows off again. They've already gone, history; he's moved on. There can be but one deduction
the dose needs to be increased. — Mark Barrowcliffe

I generally disagree with most of the very high margin opportunities. Why? Because it's a business strategy tradeoff: the lower the margin you take, the faster you grow. — Vinod Khosla

The Shat-el-Arab is a noble river or estuary. From both its Persian and Turkish shores, however, mountains have disappeared, and dark forests of date palms intersected by canals fringe its margin heavily, and extend to some distance inland. — Isabella Bird

Sometimes the results of a first free election will find the moderates so poorly organized that extreme groups can eke out a victory, as Hamas did when it gained a 44-to-41 percent margin in the Palestinian election of 2006. — Elliott Abrams

The results of a new study are out this week saying that New Jersey is one of the most livable states in the country. The study has a margin of error of 100 percent. — Conan O'Brien

The Tour (de France) is essentially a math problem, a 2,000-mile race over three weeks that's sometimes won by a margin of a minute or less. How do you propel yourself through space on a bicycle, sometimes steeply uphill, at a speed sustainable for three weeks? Every second counts. — Lance Armstrong

Nothing irrevocable had yet been spoken, but there was only the barest margin of safety left them, each of them moving delicately along the outskirts of an open question, and, once spoken, such a question-as "Do you love me?" -could never be answered or forgotten. They walked slowly, meditating, wondering, and the path sloped down from their feet and they followed, walking side by side in the most extreme intimacy of expectation; their feinting and hesitation done with, they could only await passively for resolution. Each knew, almost within a breath, what the other was thinking and wanting to say; each of them almost wept for the other. They perceived at the same moment the change in the path and each knew then the other's knowledge of it; Theodora took Eleanor's arm and, afraid to stop, they moved on slowly, close together, and ahead of them the path widened and blackened and curved. — Shirley Jackson

Commissions add up, taxes are a big drag, margin ain't cheap. A good accountant costs money as well. The math on this one is obvious, yet investors often fail to recognize it: Keep your costs low and your turnover lower, and you will win in the end. — Barry Ritholtz

Edge also implies what Ben Graham ... called a margin of safety. You have a margin of safety when you buy an asset at a price that is substantially less than its value. As Graham noted, the margin of safety 'is available for absorbing the effect of miscalculations or worse than average luck.' ... Graham expands, "The margin of safety is always dependent on the price paid. It will be large at one price, small at some higher price, nonexistent at some still higher price." — Michael Mauboussin