Running for governor of Texas against a very popular governor [incumbent Ann Richards] was deemed to be risky. Everybody thought I would lose. As I put in my book, my mother said, "You're going to lose!"
We didn't become the most prosperous country in the world just by rewarding greed and recklessness. We didn't come this far by letting the special interests run wild. We didn't do it just by gambling and chasing paper profits on Wall Street. We built this country by making things, by producing goods we could sell.
As a fighter pilot I know from my own experiences how decisive surprise and luck can be for success, which in the long run comes only to the one who combines daring with cool thinking.
When you really understand that you are what you see and know, you do not run around the countryside thinking, "I am all this!" There is simply all this.
If we start deciding, based on guesses or emotions, whether we will or won't participate in a business where we should have some long run edge, we're in trouble.
When we really sit back with a smile on our face is when we run into a situation we can understand, where the facts are ascertainable and clear, and the course of action obvious.
Fortunate indeed are those in which there is combined a little good and a little bad, a little knowledge of many things outside their own callings, a capacity for love and a capacity for hate, for such as these can look with tolerance upon all, unbiased by the egotism of him whose head is so heavy on one side that all his brains run to that point.
I'm projected as an ambulance chaser, but I'm more the ambulance. People call me because they know I will come.... I have never fought a case where they didn't ask me to come. People have
this picture like I'm sitting up in bed at night with a walkie-talkie. "You hear anything? Oh, let's run! It's Virginia today!"... Every victim calls us.... "Who put Sharpton in charge?" The
victim!
People who count their chickens before they are hatched act very wisely because chickens run about so absurdly that it's impossible to count them accurately.