Bets Quotes & Sayings

And so whether you were six with the chicken pox, nine with the flu, twelve with a broken arm, or fifteen with menstrual cramps, you could count on sixty solid minutes with the company of that old seventies set, lots of one-dollar bets, and advice to neuter your pet, all crunched into the best sick-day game show yet! — Neil Pasricha

Your mama coming back. Just cause you cant sees a person aint mean nothing. They still there. You worry you never gonna find your mama but she gonna come to you. Close your eyes. I bets you see her good. — Nancy Rawles

I'm agnostic," I told him. "I'd be an atheist, except I believe in hedging my bets. — Lisa Kleypas

Aspiring only to second-place goals is a first-rate way to hedge our bets. Among the least appreciated reasons for doing superficial, second-rate work of any kind is the comfort of knowing that it's not our best that's on the line. Far more is at risk when we do what we really want to do rather than something less. I don't think we'll ever fully appreciate the role of not daring to risk a shattered dream in limiting people to second-choice careers and third-choice lives. — Ralph Keyes

The guys were taking bets on the winner. Half were betting on the old woman." Yasha nodded in agreement. "The babushka is a biter." "Though nice style points there with the hat," Calvin added. "We've never considered using hats as weapons. Maybe we should add it to our training." "I'd break every bone in my hand if I punched you," I said. "You realize that's the only thing saving you, right? — Lisa Shearin

Is it better to go indie and make bigger profits on each book, or stick with a print publisher's 6%-10% royalties? Since I never could figure out what I wanted to do when I grew up, I'm hedging my bets and working both sides of the street. — Ruth Glick

They were combing the markets for bets whose true odds were 10:1, priced as if the odds were 100:1. — Michael Lewis

I was hedging my bets by the time I got to college. I was interested in drama and journalism and psychology. — Hank Azaria

I like bets... my favourite ones are those in which food plays big role. — Deyth Banger

You can't outwit fate by trying to stand on the sidelines and place little side bets about the outcome of life. Either you wade in and risk everything to play the game, or you don't play at all. And if you don't play, you can't win. — Judith McNaught

If I had to lay bets, my bet would be that everything is going to go to hell, but, you know, what else have we got except hope? — Richard Rorty

No punching?" he asked.
"No."
"No kicking?"
"No."
"How about arm wrestling?"
"No. And before you ask, we've avoided Slug Bug, Slap Bets, and any and all Dance-Offs."
Fate Succumbs — Tammy Blackwell

Samuelson, however, hedged his personal bets - by putting some of his own money in Berkshire Hathaway. — William Poundstone

You know what works in venture capital? A group of incredibly smart, connected people who have the financial wherewithal and risk appetite to make multi-million dollar bets on unproven ideas and inexperienced founders. People who can make decisions quickly, and who spend their time trying to help entrepreneurs make the most of that cash. — Sarah Lacy

Don't be afraid to do weird stuff, so long as you do it cheaply and cover everyone's bets. Be bold. Be stupid, if you have to: so long as you don't hurt anybody, what's it matter how dopey your dream is? If I hadn't made TUSK? If I'd let it die as a podcast? I wouldn't have three other movies I'm now making within the span of a year. Some folks will try to shame you for trying something outside the norm; the only shame is in not trying to accomplish your dreams. — Kevin Smith

he'd learned the secret of a richer, more powerful adult rage. "It isn't how it was! It never will be again! They changed the rules on us, so as far as I'm concerned all bets are off." He cinched his belt tight. "If They apologized, if They showed — Lev Grossman

Always hedge your bets. That's how I do it. I lay all my bets on what I can contribute, and suffer no illusions that I'm generating stuff by myself. — Dan Harmon

My brother was on his way
to a dental appointment
when the second plane hit
four stories below the office
where he worked. He's never
said anything about the guy
who took football bets, how
he liked to watch his secretary
walk, the friends he ate lunch with,
all the funerals. Maybe, shamed
by his luck, he keeps quiet,
afraid someone might guess
how good he feels, breathing. — Tony Gloeggler

The main reason I write the daily observations is because I want to know where I'm wrong. So lots of times if somebody points something out it helps me, and I want to have a diversified bet of uncorrelated bets. — Ray Dalio

I've got like a week and a half left, all bets are off. — Rob Corddry

We have always tried to concentrate on the long term, and to place bets on technology we believe will have a significant impact over time. It's hard to imagine now, but when we started Google most people thought search was a solved problem and that there was no money to be made apart from some banner advertising. We felt the exact opposite: that search quality was very poor, and that awesome user experiences would clearly make money. — Larry Page

My second Christian name is John. Good solid bourgeois Christian name, like my first name, Peter, a rock. Minerals. Build on rock, rocks, uranium. Peter and John were two of the twelve apostles - arguable the two most significant. Were my parents hedging their bets? — Peter Greenaway

This election isn't about Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. It's about you. The other guys write $10 million checks and make $10,000 bets. But we've bet this campaign on you. — Jim Messina

There's also a possibility that the landlord is in there right now, wearing women's undergarments. Or a drug addict is inside stealing jewelry.Or a boatload of recent Chinese immigrants without a television watching Russia play Finland in hockey and placing bets over beer.
You have no idea what's behind that door. You can't just pick the options within your field of vision. Reality comes from everywhere. At best, you can narrow down the likelihoods. But in the end, it's not a matter of deduction. It's a matter of fact. One bullet will kill you if you're stupid or unlucky. So at least don't be stupid — Derek B. Miller

Good luck with that, Harvath thought. In his experience, life was predominantly made up of three distinct groups: sheep, sheepdogs, and wolves. And if there was one thing he had learned from a lifetime of hunting wolves and protecting sheep, it was that sheep had two speeds - graze and stampede. Now that word was out that the virus was loose, all bets were off. Very soon, chaos was going to ensue. "What else do you have?" he asked, bracing himself for more bad news. "The pharmaceutical companies Damien's involved with appear pretty benign. One focuses on dementia medication and the other on birth control drugs. — Brad Thor

The first thing I learned is when times are tough, you need to hedge your bets - you need to diversify. — Donald Trump

Donald Trump just pledged to be loyal to the Green Party, the Communist Party and Party Central, as long as they agree to be nice to that thing on his head. If not, all bets are off. — Michael R. Burch

He who bets on governments and government money bets against 6,000 years of recorded human history. — Gary North

Bitcoins are not a real investment; they are bets inside a casino. If the price goes back up, don't be fooled. In the parlance of popping investment bubbles, it's something called a 'dead-cat bounce.' People who are desperate to keep the game going rush back in, hoping to bring the price back up, but it never lasts. — Kurt Eichenwald

They placed their bets with such self righteous bravado, but I'm the one who lost. — Chuck Palahniuk

What I learned at LucasArts was, you don't make your bets on ideas: ideas are cheap. You make your bets on people. — Tim Schafer

Some business bets in which one wins big but infrequently, yet loses small but frequently, are worth making if others are suckers for them and if you have the personal and intellectual stamina. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Historically, people move west more than east. People go east only when invited. When opportunity knocks.
People go west when all bets are off: a reputation in ruins, a love gone wrong. When they need to save their sorry souls, folks head for the frontier. — Karen Hines

Place bets on your dreams and be your own hero! — Joel Brown

Successful gamblers - and successful forecasters of any kind - do not think of the future in terms of no-lose bets, unimpeachable theories, and infinitely precise measurements. These are the illusions of the sucker, the sirens of his overconfidence. — Nate Silver

[Donald Trump] hedging his bets because he's used to buying politicians. — Marco Rubio

If there's ever an example of the importance of making bold bets and focusing on what you love, it's Twitter. — Dick Costolo

I'm not making any bets on the future. — Michelle Williams

We've invested in Newark's children, the schools and teachers, and these are long-term bets that need a number of years to really pan out. We've seen and learned how important it is to listen to the community and really get a sense of what they need and want. And it's a long journey. — Priscilla Chan

When the subject turns to abortion, cosmetic intervention, birth, motherhood, sex, love, work, misogyny, fear, or just how you feel in your own skin, women still won't often tell the truth to each other unless they are very, very drunk. Perhaps the endlessly reported rise in female binge-drinking is simply modern women's attempt to communicate with each other. Or maybe it is because Sancerre is so very delicious. To be honest, I'll take bets on either. — Caitlin Moran

Once you embark on a road of imagination and creating, all bets are off. All preconceptions about what you must do, make, think, assume, and believe are yesterday's news. — Jon Rappoport

I'm the same way," Lana admitted. "I keep picking guys who are bad bets because they do what I expect them to screw me over. That way, It's never my fault when the relationship fails. — Jen Frederick

Hedge funds have made massive leveraged credit bets, knowing that their upside is billions in fees and their downside is millions in fees. — Janet M. Tavakoli

LTCM lost money when Russia defaulted on a certain class of bonds, and then they had other investments like on the spread between two different kinds of shares of Royal Dutch Shell Oil Company. Now that seems completely unrelated to Russian bonds. But they were related because other hedge funds saw similar discrepancies and they were all making similar bets. — Richard Thaler

There are no checks and balances if the gov is wrong, if a private entrepreneur makes a mistake, he goes bankrupt, the losses are cut, if he bets wrong, he loses, if the gov bets wrong, they just get bigger, they just appropriate more money, it's a bottomless pit, because they either get it from the tax payers or run it off a printing press. — Peter Schiff

The Greeks were so committed to ideas as supernatural forces that they created an entire group of goddesses (not one but nine) to represent creative power; the opening lines of both The Iliad and The Odyssey begin with calls to them. These nine goddesses, or muses, were the recipients of prayers from writers, engineers, and musicians. Even the great minds of the time, like Socrates and Plato, built shrines and visited temples dedicated to their particular muse (or muses, for those who hedged their bets). Right now, under our very secular noses, we honor these beliefs in our language, as the etymology of words like museum ("place of the muses") and music ("art of the muses") come from the Greek heritage of ideas as superhuman forces. — Scott Berkun

This is a perverse thing, personally, but I would rather be in the cycle where people are underestimating us. It gives us latitude to go out and make big bets that excite and amaze people. — Mark Zuckerberg

As a rule, she ate fairly healthily but all bets were off during times of stress. Proving the point, she'd just polished off an entire bag of pizza rolls by herself and was covered in crumbs and questioning her choices in life. — Jill Shalvis

The best restraint is old-fashioned market discipline, in which financial traders know that they, personally, will lose a ton of money if they take risky bets that don't pan out. — David Ignatius

This is part of the reason that the AIG bailout is so troubling: when at least $13 billion worth of taxpayer money given to AIG in the bailout ultimately went to Goldman, some of that money was doubtless going to cover the bets Goldman had made against the stuff the bank itself was selling to old people and cities and states. In other words, Goldman made out on the housing bubble twice: it fucked the investors who bought their horseshit CDOs by betting against its own crappy product, then it turned around and fucked the taxpayer by making him pay off those same bets. — Matt Taibbi

You still want that little secret to stay secret?"

"You wouldn't."

"You're right, I wouldn't. Not unless I heard you talked. In which case, all bets would be off."

"You're a fucking bastard, Nick. I thought you were better than - "

"I'm a paid killer, Mike. What the fuck were you expecting? — B.D. Roca

And you and Dex?"
"What about us?" ...
"What's the deal with you?"
"There is no deal. We're just partners."
"Are you sure? Because we all have bets on whether you guys are banging each other or not. — Karina Halle

Perhaps your notion of relationships is different than mine.
You want something that would be a long term safe bet. I don't believe in that. I don't believe in eternity or safe bets. I believe in the unavoidable now and that the unavoidable now in the condition that it is pure with the best intention is eternity in itself.
I want to love you and to feel your love as much as this is possible, as far as this takes us, and I hope it will take us far. — Malak El Halabi

I think anybody who bets on horses and says they win is probably a liar. — Clive Owen

The best simpleminded test of expertise in a particular area is an ability to win money in a series of bets on future occurrences in that area. — Graham T. Allison

The one thing that I think separates Microsoft from a lot of other people is we make bold bets. We're persistent about them, but we make them. A lot of people won't make a bold bet. A bold bet doesn't assure you of winning, but if you make no bold bets you can't continue to succeed. Our industry doesn't allow you to rest on your laurels forever. I mean, you can milk any great idea. Any idea that turns out to be truly great can be harvested for tens of years. On the other hand, if you want to continue to be great, you've got to bet on new things, big, bold bets. — Steve Ballmer

But Geology carries the day: it is like the pleasure of gambling, speculating, on first arriving, what the rocks may be; I often mentally cry out 3 to 1 Tertiary against primitive; but the latter have hitherto won all the bets. — Charles Darwin

He said Catholics probably had an advantage, you could hedge your bets right until you were dying. — Alice Munro

Just days after Mitt Romney suggested he might run for president, there's been a backlash. The backlash is led by Jeb Bush, Mike Huckabee, and just to hedge his bets on every issue, Mitt Romney. — Conan O'Brien

I used to be a heavy gambler. But now I just make mental bets. That's how I lost my mind. — Steve Allen

He sees her standing at the end of a passage in her life, without any next step to take - all her bets are in, she has only the tedium now of being knocked from one room to the next, a sequence of numbered rooms whose numbers do not matter, till inertia brings her to the last. That's all. — Thomas Pynchon

the Culture had placed its bets - long before the Idiran war had been envisaged - on the machine rather than the human brain. This was because the Culture saw itself as being a self-consciously rational society; and machines, even sentient ones, were more capable of achieving this desired state as well as more efficient at using it once they had. That was good enough for the Culture. — Iain M. Banks

If I knew my friends, they weren't going to make these last eleven days easy. They wanted to win their damn bets, and they wanted me to finally get my head out of my ass, by any means possible. I was pretty confident they didn't really think any sort of law applied to them, and the thought of prison clearly wasn't a deterrent if our past circumstances were any indication. Milo — Rachel Van Dyken

Bets at first were fool-traps, where the wise like spiders lay in ambush for the flies. — John Dryden

A gamble. Everything was a damn gamble. Betting against luck and the Fates, again and again, and again. She kept walking, waiting for the bullet. — Paolo Bacigalupi

With joint-stock corporations, investors can place bets on the success of many different companies, without having to play a central management role in any one of them. This allows investors to diversify their financial holdings. It also allows them to capture profits on their investments, without having to get involved in the dirty, troublesome business of actually running a company. — Jim Stanford

When you understand what's involved in winning, as do professional gamblers, you'll tend to bet more during a winning streak and less during a losing streak. However, the average person does exactly the opposite: he or she bets more after a series of losses and less after a series of wins. — Van K. Tharp

When did you guys even start speaking again?"
Ernie shrugged and popped a peanut into his mouth. "He's probably just sniffing around here so I leave him my property when I kick it." He drank his beer and leaned back into his easy chair. "Eh, he's a good kid. My sister's only son. He's family. Family's family. Never forget that, Conrad."
"Ernie, two commercial breaks ago, you told me that if I didn't try and break up my brother's wedding, I was a punk!"
Picking at his teeth, Ernie said, "If a girl's the one, all bets are off, family or no family. — Jenny Han

TV families and your own are hard to tell apart, except your isn't interrupted every six minutes by commercials and theirs don't get bogged down into nothingness, a state where nothing happens, no skit, no zany visitors, no outburst on the laugh track, nothing at all but boredom and a lost feeling, especially when you get up in the morning and the moon is still shining and men are making noisy bets on the first tee. — John Updike

At the top of Charlie Ledley's list of concerns, after Cornwall Capital had laid its bets against subprime loans, was that the powers that be might step in at any time to prevent individual American subprime mortgage borrowers from failing. The powers that be never did that, of course. Instead they stepped in to prevent the failure of the big Wall Street firms that had contrived to bankrupt themselves by making a lot of dumb bets on subprime borrowers. After — Michael Lewis

Increase your bets when you are confident and scale down your positions when you don't have conviction. — George Soros

All the smart money got they bets on me / And all the real niggas wish the best for me — Nipsey Hussle

It was in this pub he'd learnt that, contrary to the belief of the majority of those laying bets, it is possible to flatten a hundred frogs with a hammer in less than thirty seconds. In short, it was a pub with a reputation. And very slimy walls. — Tony McGuin

Yes, stop playing, Kestrel, she told herself. Clear the bets, clear the table. Walk away from the game. Now. — Marie Rutkoski

It was a problem that needed squaring away and I squared it away for them. By now it seemed like it was something I was doing all my life. If you count my father sending me out to beat up other boys so he could win beer bets, maybe it was. Evidently — Charles Brandt

That's the thing," Jo says. "You think you know what you're in for. I mean, you tell yourself that, of course, it's not going to be wine and roses and all of that bullshit for the rest of your life, but then, one day, you wake up, and your fucking husband has morphed into someone whom you barely recognize. And you sit there and you stare at him while he scratches his balls through his underwear at the kitchen table, and you think, 'This is totally not what I signed up for. I mean, who knows if I even love this ball-scratching, foul-breathed man?' And then you wonder if you love him more out of habit than out of anything else." She chews the inside of her lip and considers. "And I guess from there, all bets are off. — Allison Winn Scotch

Cognition requires going beyond the information given, to make bets and therefore to risk errors. — Gerd Gigerenzer

He doesn't believe the dead need our prayers, nor can they use them. But anyone who knows the Bible as he does, knows that our God is a capricious God, and there's no harm in hedging your bets. — Hilary Mantel

I suddenly remember an old game I used to play when I was nine or ten, and I was allowed to ride my bike until it got dark. I used to make little bets with myself as I watched the sun getting lower and lower on the horizon: If I hold my breath to twenty seconds, the night won't come. If I don't blink. If I stand so still a fly lands on my cheek. Now, I find myself doing the same thing, bargaining to keep Kate, even though that isn't the way it works. — Jodi Picoult

I can't tell you how it came to take me so many years to learn that instead of placing piking bets on what the next few quotations were going to be, my game was to anticipate what was going to happen in a big way. — Anonymous

When the ground starts moving, all bets are off. — Joan Didion

On a really big budget movie you do chemistry reads, and you sort of hedge your bets a little bit more and make sure that these people get along. But on the low budget side of things, I have to trust my gut that when I cast these people, the various elements are going to play together. — Joe Swanberg

He does not depend on insider tips, crooked referees, or other sorts of hustles to make his bets. Nor does he have a "system" of any kind. He uses computer simulations, but does not rely upon them exclusively. — Nate Silver

Just because things get a little dingy at the subatomic level doesn't mean all bets are off. — Murray Gell-Mann

Now, it has been independently shown that people hate to lose something more than they enjoy gaining it. For example, they don't mind paying for something with a credit card even when told there is a discount for cash, but they hate paying the same amount if they are told there is a surcharge for using credit. As a result, people will often refuse to gamble for an expected profit (they turn down bets such as "Heads, you win $120; tails, you pay $100), but they will gamble to avoid an expected loss (such as "Heads, you no longer owe $120; tails, you now owe an additional $100"). (This kind of behavior drives economists crazy, but is avidly studied by investment firms hoping to turn it to their advantage.) The combination of people's loss aversion with the effects of framing explains the paradoxical result: the "gain" metaphor made the doctors risk-averse; the "loss" metaphor made them gamblers. — Steven Pinker

Mars still remains the astrobiology community's number one choice for 'nearest rock with life,' but there are many researchers who argue that the moons of Jupiter are better bets. In particular, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto are all thought to hide vast oceans of liquid water beneath their icy, outer skins. — Seth Shostak

Americans, though apparently impressed by ghastly sentimentality and outrageous hypocrisy, are by nature much more politically cynical than Canadians. In their longer history they have had much more to be cynical about. They demand a vulgar show, enjoy it, guffaw, and forget it the next morning. When a new U.S. President takes office all bets are off and his campaign platform is dismantled and stored away. — Gordon Donaldson

Over time I've learned, surprisingly, that it's tremendously hard to get teams to be super ambitious. It turns out most people haven't been educated in this kind of moonshot thinking. They tend to assume that things are impossible, rather than starting from real-world physics and figuring out what's actually possible. It's why we've put so much energy into hiring independent thinkers at Google, and setting big goals. Because if you hire the right people and have big enough dreams, you'll usually get there. And even if you fail, you'll probably learn something important. It's also true that many companies get comfortable doing what they have always done, with a few incremental changes. This kind of incrementalism leads to irrelevance over time, especially in technology, because change tends to be revolutionary not evolutionary. So you need to force yourself to place big bets on the future. — Eric Schmidt

In America, people with lots of money can easily avoid the consequences of bad bets and big losses by cashing out at the first sign of trouble. — Robert Reich

The outcome of the city will depend on the race between the automobile and the elevator, and anyone who bets on the elevator is crazy. — Frank Lloyd Wright

Control was just wishful thinking, and you controlled things to hedge your bets, to be safe, to guard against loss. — Deb Caletti

The shareholders who financed the risk taking had no real understanding of what the risk takers were doing, and, as the risk taking grew ever more complex, their understanding diminished. All that was clear was that the profits to be had from smart people making complicated bets overwhelmed anything that could be had from servicing customers, or allocating capital to productive enterprise. — Michael Lewis

She does not want to feel even the faintest temptation to call his mobile number, as she had done obsessively for the first year after his death so she could hear his voice on the answering service. Most days now his loss is a part of her, an awkward weight she carries around, invisible to everyone else, subtly altering the way she moves through the day. But today, the Anniversary of the day he died, is a day when all bets are off. — Jojo Moyes

Right before I decided to come out, I went on a spiritual retreat called 'Changing the Inner Dialogue of Your Subconscious Mind.' I'd never been to anything like it before, and all my friends were taking bets on how long I'd last with no TV, no radio, no phone. But for me that was the beginning of paying attention to all the little things. — Ellen DeGeneres

There are just four kinds of bets. There are good bets, bad bets, bets that you win, and bets that you lose. Winning a bad bet can be the most dangerous outcome of all, because a success of that kind can encourage you to take more bad bets in the future, when the odds will be running against you. You can also lose a good bet no matter how sound the underlying proposition, but if you keep placing good bets, over time, the law of averages will be working for you. — Larry Hite

if the past is any indicator of our future, today's big bets won't seem so wild in a few years' time. — Eric Schmidt

The trading rules I live by are: 1. Cut losses. 2. Ride winners. 3. Keep bets small. 4. Follow the rules without question. 5. Know when to break the rules. — Ed Seykota

The model I like to sort of simplify the notion of what goes on in a market for common stocks is the pari-mutuel system at the racetrack. If you stop to think about it, a pari-mutuel system is a market. Everybody goes there and bets and the odds change based on what's bet. That's what happens in the stock market. — Charlie Munger

The warning signs had been there since the crash of 2008, but after the initial shock, nothing had been done to correct the problem. Banks had been trading over $7 trillion in risky derivatives daily, as well as fixing interest rates and making bets on the rigged games. There was an ever-growing gap between the elite and all the rest of the people which had continued to develop even after the 2008 crash. — Kenneth Eade

Many of us assume that we have to do things a certain way: ignore passion in favor of safer bets, act stoic amid inner turmoil, run on an upward trajectory of success and money acquisition at any emotional cost. But these are not rules. — Martha Beck