Quotes About Trade-offs

These are big trade-offs for a simple piece of cake —add five hundred calories, subtract well-being, allure, and self-esteem — and the feelings behind them are anything but vain or shallow... The experience of appetite in this equation is an experience of anxiety, a burden and a risk; yielding to hunger may be permissible under certain conditions, but mostly it's something to be Earned or Monitored and Controlled.

What is so terrible about transaction costs? On what basis are they considered the ultimate evil, so that their minimization must override all other considerations of choice, freedom, and justice?

it happens in all human affairs that we never seek to escape one mischief without falling into another. Prudence therefore consists in knowing how to distinguish degrees of disadvantage, and in accepting a less evil as a good.

You couldn't have everything. At least, not all at the same time.

It takes real guts to ignore or even alienate 93% of customers, focusing instead on the 7% of the market that is fanatical about you and willing to put up with the trade-offs.

Let us not envy a certain class of men for their enormous riches; they have paid such an equivalent for them that it would not suit us; they have given for them their peace of mind, their health, their honour, and their conscience; this is rather too dear, and there is nothing to be made out of such a bargain.

Better to have bad breath than no breath at all.

You preserve nothing without encountering some disadvantages. If we keep this [prairie] dog town, horses will break their legs and rattlers will come back. But in the large picture, things balance out, as they did two thousand years ago. The trick is to preserve the balance and pay whatever price it costs.

When you do something, you miss something else! If you don't want to miss anything, you have to do everything!

There's a saying in engineering: You can build things cheap, fast, or right, but not all three.

The quickest way may not necessarily be the best.

One jet plane means this many fewer schools and hospitals.

Everything has an opportunity cost. Money is completely fungible, and so every penny spent on one thing could be spent on something else. The question all of us need to ask ourselves is whether that something else might actually make us or our loved ones happier.

I put my career in second place throughout both my marriages and it suffered. I don't regret it. You make choices. If you want a good marriage, you must pay attention to that. If you want to be independent, go ahead. You can't have it all.

To govern is always to choose among disadvantages.

My sister made certain choices about the life she wanted. Those choices include a steady job, a husband and children. But balance and stability come at a cost. It is harder for her to be spontaneous. It is harder to just up and leave.

The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.

There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.

In the end, life is wonderful but nonetheless a series of trade offs, especially between business/professional endeavours and family/community.

When I first arrived at UConn, I told myself I was going to dedicate my life to basketball. And when you do something like that, you alienate a lot of other things in your life that most people think are normal things to do.

Because every design must satisfy competing objectives, there necessarily has to be compromise among, if not the complete exclusion of, some of those objectives, in order to meet what are considered the more important of them.

Truth be told, in determining what you want and who you want to be with, you will be compromising in certain areas. It can be in the area of appearance or occupation or maybe even certain personality characteristics, but no one person can have everything.

I've learned that you can't have everything and do everything at the same time.

Anyone with faith in economic man would think that people would put up with the pain of a long commute only if they enjoyed even greater benefits from cheaper housing or bigger, finer homes or higher-paying jobs. They would weigh the costs and benefits and make sensible decisions. A couple of University of Zurich economists discovered that this simply isn't the case.