"Someone who dreads the prospect of public speaking risks making a fool out of himself (at least in his own mind) by going on stage."

So....if i begin with the premise that I am a fool, I can avoid many (unnecessary) risks? Sounds like a plan :-)

QUOTATIONS (from the paper "Hazard" by J.G. Bennett):

–"Hope does not consist in the realization of potential, but in the augmentation of potential. This is objective hope."
–"The doctrine of the omnipotence of God is certainly incompatible with the reality of hazard in Creation."
–"There is no other way in which we can come to terms with the world except to reject any kind of security, either proximate or ultimate, or any expectation of finding a truth that is ultimate and absolute."
–"In a perfect world, there would be no place for goodness."
–"There is no permanent, unchanging reality onto which we can fasten or toward which we can hope to move. There is only an uncertain, changing, unstable world within which we can catch glimpse of some possible meaning."
–"To take an opportunity means an act of judgment."
–"The [required] attitude… consists in taking… uncertainties not as obstacles to the achievement of the aim… but, on the contrary, as the only means by which the way is opened."
–"As soon as there is some interaction between mind and mindlessness, then there is hazard because mind is meaningful and mindlessness is without meaning."
–"To say that God is love and that he loves the world would be quite meaningless if the world were no more than a passive instrument in God’s hands, bound entirely by the Divine Will in every action, in every event, large and small."