Long-Term Outcome Quotes

Those who were unlucky in life in spite of their skills would eventually rise. The lucky fool might have benefited from some luck in life; over the longer run he would slowly converge to the state of a less-lucky idiot. Each one would revert to his long-term properties.

What I say or do here won't matter much, nor should it.

The process is so much longer than the result for almost everything all of us are doing.

Each of us has interests which conflict the interests of everybody else... 'everybody else' we call 'society'. It's a powerful opponent and it always wins. Oh, here and there an individual prevails for a while and gets what he wants. Sometimes he storms the culture of a society and changes it to his own advantage. But society wins in the long run, for it has the advantage of numbers and of age.

A hospital may spend several million dollars separating a pair of conjoined twins even though that separation is likely to leave them worse off.

When you've played this game for ten years and gone to bat seven-thousand times and gotten two-thousand hits do you know what that really means? It means you've gone zero for five-thousand.

Sometimes you can do the work in the moment, and you don't know whether it's going to really have meaning once time has elapsed.

Three surgeries on the same limb, that's a tall order.