Downside Up Quotes & Sayings

In 1999 the National Research Council concluded that 'the total exposure to naturally occurring carcinogens exceeds the exposure to synthetic carcinogens.'...
The point was that even if organics were pesticide-free, the gain wouldn't make up for the downside of organic food: It's more likely to be infested with bacteria because it's grown in 'natural' fertilizer. Natural fertilizer is the health food business's euphemism for cow manure. (The much-criticized 'nonorganic' produce is grown in nitrogen fertilizers. Although organics advocates sneer at the chemicals, 'chemical' nitrogen is perfectly healthy; air is 78 percent nitrogen, after all. We have a choice between foods grown in nitrogen taken from the air, and 'organic' food grown in cow manure.) — John Stossel

I think travel is probably the downside of playing professional golf, but you've got to do it. — Karrie Webb

On the other hand, Protestantism's shedding away of authority, as evidenced by my mother's proclamation that I needn't go to church or listen to a preacher to achieve salvation, inspires self-reliance - along with a dangerous disregard for expertise. So the impulse that leads to democracy can also be the downside of democracy - namely, a suspicion of people who know what they are talking about. It's why in U.S. presidential elections the American people will elect a wisecracking good ol'boy who's fun in a malt shop instead of a serious thinker who actually knows some of the pompous, brainy stuff that might actually get fewer people laid off or killed. — Sarah Vowell

Mutual Criticism required a member of the group to stand up in front of everybody and listen to the enumeration of his or her faults. The bright side of being that night's subject for criticism was the rare treat at Oneida of being the center of attention. The downside was that everyone you knew and loved was allowed, even encouraged, to look into your eyes and ask, You know what your problem is? — Sarah Vowell

Investors need to pick their poison: Either make more money when times are good and have a really ugly year every so often, or protect on the downside and don't be at the party so long when things are good. — Seth Klarman

The upside of fall was the tourists had gone home. The downside was the county stopped spraying for mosquitos and no-see-ums, so the little fuckers got to gorge themselves in a type of 'eat local' frenzy. — Natasha Boyd

To put money into anything, anywhere, provided that the downside is measurable and acceptable and the chances of a good profit appear to be better than 50%. I will not take gambles, but it is part of my job description to be ready to take very carefully calculated risks. — Peter Cundill

The argument is that Black History Month dwells too much on the downside of white America's relationship to its brothers of African heritage, slavery and torture and the like, and ignores the work of all the good white folk through the years who were nice to black people (did you know it was a white teacher who first suggested George Washington Carver study horticulture?). — Matt Taibbi

Why do people care what I'm wearing or what I'm eating, and why are people looking down on me because I'm not wearing high heels? That's the downside to being in the public eye. — Ashley Greene

On the upside, yesterday I taped a Ziploc bag to the inside of my skirt so I'd have someplace to store my everything-that-didn't-fit-in-my-bra and it worked really well, so now I'm working on a cape made solely from stapled-together Ziploc bags. It'll be awesome because I'll be able to see all the stuff in my Ziploc pockets (unlike my purse, which just eats everything, like a tiny black hole). And it'll also double as a rain poncho. And I can put a stiletto knife and a "How to Stab People" pamphlet in it so assholes know not to fuck with me and I don't even have to pull it out and threaten them. There is no downside to this. — Jenny Lawson

The downside of being a writer is you get plenty of time to overthink your life. — Donald Miller

I don't demonize the downside. As we've seen in Egypt and Tahrir square and other recent event, the adhesiveness through [technology] kinds of communication is extraordinary. Interesting times we live in. — Anne Waldman

Now, the downside to conservation is that so much is done for the public, which almost always mars the environment that one wanted to conserve. — Arne Jacobsen

I think there are lots of opportunities to improve the product. When you read the press, people say, "Oh, the product needs improvement." I look at that and say, "Hey, that's an exciting thing to get behind!" Because they can improve that product. That leaves more upside from an innovation and revenue potential than you're gonna find in [a] lot of places. So you could say that's a downside, I see that as an opportunity. — Steve Ballmer

I'm not into danger, either." "Aw, Chess. You so into it you ain't climb out with a rope. Why else you do your job, live down here, buy from Bump?" "It's just - I mean - I just do, is all." Her cheeks burned. She shouldn't have let him come in here. She should have just sent him home and let him wash his stupid shirt himself. "No shame in it. Some of us needs an edge on things make us feel right, else we ain't like feeling at all, aye? — Stacia Kane

I've seen a rich man beg, I've seen a good man sin
I've seen a tough man cry, I've seen a loser win
And a sad man grin, I heard an honest man lie
I've seen the good side of bad and the downside of up
And everything between

I licked the silver spoon, drank from the golden cup
And smoked the finest green
I stroked the fattest dimes at least a couple of times
Before I broke their heart
You know where it ends, yo, it usually depends on where you start — Everlast

I know about Trina. You bitch."
Shoulders hunched, Peabody carefully pinned up murder. "It's a special night. You'll look really good, and you won't have to do it all yourself. We won't want the NYPSD to fall short of the Hollywood crowd, right? Team pride!"
"Rah fucking rah."
"Really, Dallas, it'll be good, it'll be chilly, and we'll look abso-mag by the time ... " She trailed off again, face lighting up. "We will look mag. And if we take down this killer at the premiere, with cams everywhere, it'll be all over the screen like the flying baby. And we'll look completely frosted."
"It's so good you've got your priorities in place, Detective."
"Catching killers, that's what we do. But if we get to do it at a big celeb event, there's no downside to looking most totally excellent. — J.D. Robb

It may part of a one way evolution ... or it may be we are currently on the downside of an innocence cycle where one day, with an up cycle, sweet will be entertaining again. — Christopher Knight

Now mayhap you quit givin Terrible the fuckin slurpy-eyes an give Bump the listening, yay? Thinkin you can? Gots some fuckin chattering wants doin, needs you fuckin head on straight up. — Stacia Kane

Even if it doesn't work out, the experience is so valuable to so many employers that your worst case scenario is, 'Ok, so that was a bust, I'll get a six-figure job at whatever company.' Risk is this outmoded idea - your parents might not understand that, but taking these types of risks doesn't have a downside. — Drew Houston

Recent brain scans have shed light on how the brain simulates the future. These simulation are done mainly in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the CEO of the brain, using memories of the past. On one hand, simulations of the future may produce outcomes that are desirable and pleasurable, in which case the pleasure centers of the brain light up (in the nucleus accumbens and the hypothalamus). On the other hand, these outcomes may also have a downside to them, so the orbitofrontal cortex kicks in to warn us of possible dancers. There is a struggle, then, between different parts of the brain concerning the future, which may have desirable and undesirable outcomes. Ultimately it is the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex that mediates between these and makes the final decisions. (Some neurologists have pointed out that this struggle resembles, in a crude way, the dynamics between Freud's ego, id, and superego.) — Michio Kaku

One downside of living with a Were-cheetah is that he purrs when he's happy. At times, the apartment vibrated
all day from MeShack's enjoyment of life. — Kenya Wright

The downside was that for 400 years, science has grown up, has arisen and developed as a purely materialist concept and avoided the subject of mind and consciousness, leaving it to the realm of religion. Only with the founding of quantum science in the early part of the 20th century have we realized that the Cartesian Duality is wrong, that body, mind, physicality do interact and they're interrelated. — Edgar Mitchell

The biggest downside to being a novelist is writing the novel. — Jill Barnett

The downside of attending to the emotional life of groups is that it can swamp the ability to get anything done; a group can become more concerned with satisfying its members than with achieving its goals. Bion identified several ways that groups can slide into pure emotion - they can become "groups for pairing off," in which members are mainly interested in forming romantic couples or discussing those who form them; they can become dedicated to venerating something, continually praising the object of their affection (fan groups often have this characteristic, be they Harry Potter readers or followers of the Arsenal soccer team), or they can focus too much on real or perceived external threats. Bion trenchantly observed that because external enemies are such spurs to group solidarity, some groups will anoint paranoid leaders because such people are expert at identifying external threats, thus generating pleasurable group solidarity even when the threats aren't real. — Clay Shirky

A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion - in other words, the amount of downside he is exposed to. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

It is only by being bold that you get anywhere. If you are a risk-taker, then the art is to protect the downside. — Richard Branson

Photography ruins marriages, and I've been married three times - so there's a downside to it as well. — Jack Welpott

Sure, theater is tough because you're not home at night a lot and you work on weekends - every job has its downside. But to do something that you love doing for two hours a night, that's a pretty sweet gig. — Robert Sean Leonard

As an adventurer ... I try to protect against the downside. I make sure I have covered as many eventualities as I can. In the end, you have to take calculated risks; otherwise you're going to sit in mothballs all day and do nothing. — Richard Branson

There's no real downside to any sort of work that I do. I'm all so grateful for it, but I wouldn't say that animated work is just a walk in the park. It is easy, it's really fun, but I don't know why I really stress myself out every time I'm about to go in. — Christopher Mintz-Plasse

It was her problem, and she'd deal with it. Because dealing with personal problems was so fucking high on her list of skills. — Stacia Kane

Does the work get easier once you know what you are doing?"
"Your lungs grow thick with stone dust and your eyes bleary from the sun and fragments thrown up by the chisel. You pour your lifeblood out into works of stone for Romans who will take your money in taxes to feed soldiers who will nail your people to crosses for wanting to be free. Your back breaks, your bones creak, your wife screeches at you, and your children torment you with open begging mouths, like greedy baby birds in the nest. You go to bed every night so tired and beaten that you pray to the Lord to send the angel of death to take you in your sleep so you don't have to face another morning. It also has its downside. — Christopher Moore

Manage the downside; the upside will take care of itself — Donald Trump

The problem a lot of writers have is that they really, really enjoy people saying, "You're brilliant." They let their self-perception be dictated by reader response. But if you're going to let other people make you feel good, you're going to end up feeling bad when they say the opposite. You've got to be a cultural stoic. Then you won't be devastated by people who respond negatively. Of course, the downside is that it sort of stops you from being able to enjoy people liking your work. — Chuck Klosterman

To see how transfer of antifragility works, consider two scenarios, in which the market does the same thing on average but following different paths. Path 1: market goes up 50 percent, then goes back down to erase all gains. Path 2: market does not move at all. Visibly Path 1, the more volatile, is more profitable to the managers, who can cash in their stock options. So the more jagged the route, the better it is for them. And of course society - here the retirees - has the exact opposite payoff since they finance bankers and chief executives. Retirees get less upside than downside. Society pays for the losses of the bankers, but gets no bonuses from them. If you don't see this transfer of antifragility as theft, you certainly have a problem. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

We're in a society where no one's putting a gun to your head and making you use your phone, but some people start to crack. "I Want the Heartbeat" is about the downside of it. People can and do break up friendships and relationships because of the internet, and that can't be good. You have to find a balance. You can't let it be the boss of you. — Johnny Marr

Where I grew up - we started out in Oklahoma and then moved to Missouri - it was considered hubris to talk about yourself. And the downside of that was that ideas rarely got exchanged, or true feelings. — Brad Pitt

Distribution has really changed. You can make a record with a laptop in the morning and have it up on YouTube in the afternoon and be a star overnight. The talent on YouTube is incredible, and it can spread like wildfire. The downside is that it's very hard to convince the younger generation that they should pay for music. — Bonnie Raitt

That's the downside of growing up. There's a lot of pretending involved. We frequently act like someone other than who we really are because we don't know or aren't comfortable with our true selves. — Connor Franta

If you grow up ... in the suburbs of anywhere, a dream like this seems kind of vaguely ludicrous and completely unattainable, this moment is directly connected to those childhood imaginings. And for anybody who's on the downside of advantage, and relying purely on courage, it's possible. — Russell Crowe

The only downside to playing the violin is that you never know when you're going to be asked to play. I could be out to dinner or having a drink at a bar, and someone could just give me a violin, and I've got to be ready to play. — Charlie Siem

I'm a complete addict of The 'X Factor,' so I can see why everyone gets so inspired. But there's a downside to celebrity: your life is up for grabs, your career is much more disposable, and you are therefore vulnerable. It's a high price to pay. — Diana Quick

Aside from the movies, examples of positive-Black Swan businesses are: some segments of publishing, scientific research, and venture capital. In these businesses, you lose small to make big. You have little to lose per book and, for completely unexpected reasons, any given book might take off. The downside is small and easily controlled. The problem with publishers, of course, is that they regularly pay up for books, thus making their upside rather limited and their downside monstrous. (If you pay $10 million for a book, your Black Swan is it not being a bestseller.) Likewise, while technology can carry a great payoff, paying for the hyped-up story, as people did with the dot-com bubble, can make any upside limited and any downside huge. It is the venture capitalist who invested in a speculative company and sold his stake to unimaginative investors who is the beneficiary of the Black Swan, not the "me, too" investors. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I have seen the downside of power. I know the darkness it can create in someone, and I don't want that life. — Bridie Blake

To create something new is both thrilling and excruciating at the same time. It's great to have all these choices in front of you, and to have the writers in the room so you know exactly what they meant. But the downside is you want so badly not to screw it up! — Kate Baldwin

Men don't open up because they are prideful and self-protective. The lonely, isolated man is that way because he won't make himself known to others. Disclosure of self is the currency of intimacy. It's what our wives want and what true friendship demands. You don't have to spill your guts to everybody or anybody, but God will get you to the place where you know you need to do it with somebody. The temptation to keep it all inside is the downside of being wired as a protector. He loves us too much to leave us alone. You will never fulfill your potential as a man of God going it alone. — James MacDonald

But I live an interesting life and I can tell a pretty good story and it has helped my career. But the downside is people know everything. — Artie Lange

There's no downside to having too much experience. — Barry Levinson

One further factor, possibly the most crucial, was inherent to the way SARS-CoV affects the human body: Symptoms tend to appear in a person before, rather than after, that person becomes highly infectious. The headache, the fever, and the chills - maybe even the cough - precede the major discharge of virus toward other people. Even among some of the superspreaders, in 2003, this seems to have been true. That order of events allowed many SARS cases to be recognized, hospitalized, and placed in isolation before they hit their peak of infectivity. The downside was that hospital staff took the first big blasts of secondary infection; the upside was that those blasts generally weren't emitted by people still feeling healthy enough to ride a bus or a subway to work. This was an enormously consequential factor in the SARS episode - not just lucky but salvational. — David Quammen

The downside is that a person spends $20 to watch that hero instead of being that hero himself. — Patrick Bet-David

She clicked her phone shut. This was the downside to cell phones. It was nowhere near as satisfying to press end as it was to slam a phone into its holder. She — Jenn McKinlay

I think the downside of the Internet is that speaking-or writing-has become the point in and of itself. — Cate Blanchett

I always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous: 'try being rich first'. See if that doesn't cover most of it. There's not much downside to being rich, other than paying taxes and having your relatives ask you for money. But when you become famous, you end up with a 24-hour job. — Bill Murray

The downside is the fear.The fear of something happening to her, the pressure of there being two bodies in the world that I want to keep from harm and only being able to watchfully inhabit one of them. I wonder if you know what I mean.I hope you do for your sake. — David Mitchell

There is a downside to casual sex: Sometimes it stops being casual. People develop a desire for something more. And when one person's expectations don't match the other person's, then whoever holds the highest expectations suffers. There is no such thing as cheap sex. It always comes with a price. — Neil Strauss

My message is to get human beings to love God, love their neighbor and for the life of me I just don't see the downside of human beings not being so mean to one another and actually care for one another and not steal from one another and not murder each other for their tennis shoes. That's the message I have. — Phil Robertson

Now I tell you the downside of this is you feel awful, but the upside is you feel terrific. — Peter Cook

Fear tends to manifest itself much more quickly than greed, so volatile markets tend to be on the downside. In up markets, volatility tends to gradually decline. — Philip Roth

Golf has an ambivalent relationship with the environment. On one hand, it's a great preserver of open spaces. Golf doesn't pave the world - it helps to green the world. But the downside is, it uses a lot of fertilizer, pesticides and water. — Thomas Friedman

It's only when the markets are perceived to have exhausted themselves on the downside that they turn. Trying to prevent them from going down just merely prolongs the agony. — Alan Greenspan

When I stand on my special-issue "Intelligent Investor" ladder and peer out over the frenzied crowd, I see very few others doing the same. Many stocks remain overvalued, and speculative excess - both on the upside and on the downside - is embedded in the frenzy around stocks of all stripes. And yes, I am talking about March 2001, not March 2000. — Michael Burry

Infallible perception was definitely a downside of dating a Scion. — K.C. King

But the upside of painful knowledge is so much greater than the downside of blissful ignorance. — Sheryl Sandberg

Don't look at the downside of everything that comes along. It helps life move along so much smoother and nicer. — George Smathers

Don't get me wrong: there are aspects of buying music online that I love. Instantly being able to hear a song the moment it crosses your mind? Where's the downside? However, I do feel for those too young to remember the thrill of going record shopping. — John Niven

You know, we always tried to rationalize by saying you take the good, you take the upside, you got to deal with the downside, you've to take the downside. — Julius Erving

For me, growing up, the downside of it was that as a kid you don't want to stand out. You don't want to have a famous father let alone get a job because of your famous father, you know? But I'm a product of nepotism. That's how I got my foot in the door, through my dad. — Jeff Bridges

Microservices are important simply because they add unique value in a way of simplification of complexity in systems. By breaking apart your system or application into many smaller parts, you show ways of reducing duplication, increasing cohesion and lowering your coupling between parts, thus making your overall system parts easier to understand, more scalable, and easier to change. The downside of a distributed system is that it is always more complex from a systems standpoint. The overhead of many small services to manage is another factor to consider. — Lucas Krause

Cornwall is one of the most beautiful places, with great people - there's not a great downside to it. — Tori Amos

Already, viral contamination offers an initial response to the question of the downside of electronic circuits, but another area of research beckons the area of ecological pollution. The pollution not only of air, water, and other substances, but also the unperceived pollution of distances. — Paul Virilio

An entrepreneur is somebody who is taking bold risks, is often doing things that have never been done before, trying to do things better. And an adventurer is challenging themselves, often doing things that have never been done before, seeing what they're capable of. In both cases, you've got to protect against the downside. — Richard Branson

Hope may have a positive reputation, but it has a vicious downside. If you have hope, you can be crushed. — Ann Napolitano

That was the downside of loving someone so much. You throw your heart out there and hope nothing will yank it away and tear it to shreds. — S.C. Stephens

One has to weigh all of one's values always in relative terms. On the upside, you get people who are not acting on their homosexual attraction, who are avoiding the sin of practicing homosexuality. On the downside, you have destroyed marriages, traumatized children, and dead people who have taken their own lives. — Andrew Solomon

If we take all this actions and if it turns out not be true, we have reduced pollution and have better ways to live, the downside is very small. The other way around, and we don't act, and it turns out to be true, then we have betrayed future generations and we don't have the right to do that. — Tony Blair

Celebrities are the fodder of much of the media business, so they're always interested in making you seem provocative when you're not, or trying to bring you some sort of embarrassment by revealing something you'd rather not have revealed. That's the downside of celebrity. — Todd Rundgren

If social cohesion is one of the good things about growing up in a small town, the downside is the unchallengeable power of cliques. That sort of thing is in the nature of the teenage beast, but in bigger towns and cities there are usually so many different social groups within a single school or locality that most kids can find others they feel comfortable with. Not so in a small town. If you don't conform, even at the cost of sacrificing your principles and self-respect, you will be an outcast. And if you have a sensitive nature, it will mark you for life. — Sela Ward

I've realized that aging is the younger cousin of dying ... How much time do I have left? We become aware that we're on the downside of the mountain, coasting toward our final days. — Elizabeth Lesser

If you're expecting an upside in everything you do you might get extremely disappointed unless you also think about the consequences of a downside first. — Lou Silluzio

Successful or not, acts of physical courage always bring honor. It is the smaller forms of valor - standing up for principle at the risk of social disapproval, economic loss or injury to career - that require the greatest moral will power. Since there is usually little upside to winning and a significant and often lasting downside to losing, moral courage often requires as much character as physical bravery. — Michael Josephson

Every job has its downside. For example, being in a band; the travel part of it - getting picked up from your house in a car, going to the airport, getting on a plane, going from the airplane to a van, then going from the van to a hotel. — Dave Lombardo

Everyone has a past, and the downside to my life is that the past gets dragged up. — Tamara Ecclestone

She'd looked forward to getting away from all their usual routines and traveling together. Now she saw the downside. They might be seeing new sights, but they were their same old selves.
Why was this hotel hunt up to her? Even if she secured the perfect room, she suspected Janie would find fault with it. And then there would be more friction between them - Janie feeling huffy, Meredith inadequate. — Elizabeth Bass

Maybe it's a stretch to blame a broader social pathology on hyper-competitive soccer parents. Still, there is not a huge downside to asking every once in a while, Why am I doing this? We will know for certain that my analysis is wrong when we see the following obituary: Bob Smith died yesterday at the age of 74. He finished life in 186th place. — Charles Wheelan

Of course, the downside of attending a fictional school is that our lacrosse team sucks. — Ally Carter