Quotes About Decision-making

It was beyond unwise to enter battle angry. Anger narrowed the vision and made for foolish choices.

A man must know when to retreat from a woman," Bashere said to the air, "but a wise man knows that sometimes he must stand and face her.

I do not know. But they did not, either. That is the trick of it; their minds made up worse than I ever could. I

a general can take care of the living or weep for the dead, but he cannot do both.

most of the time he simply inquired what the questioner thought was a good solution and told him to do that. It was seldom he really had to come up with an answer; people knew what to do, they just had this fool notion they had to ask him.

Sighing, she sat back down again. "Perrin, my father says a general can take care of the living or weep for the dead, but he cannot do both.

I don't intend getting close enough to the fighting to need armor. A general who draws his sword has put aside his baton and become a common soldier.

When there were no good choices, you had to choose the one that seemed least wrong.

You tell me I have to crush a field of babies to keep breathing? Sure. You say people who rely on me aren't going to live unless I turn someone's head into a bowl of gravy? I'm there. I don't feel bad about it. I don't think about it. It just is what it is. It's survival.

The challenge is to maintain a high-level, broad perspective, understand enough details to make sensible and executable decisions, and then delegate responsibility for implementation. "Microknowledge" must not become micromanagement, but it sure helps keep people on their toes when they know that the secretary knows what the hell he's talking about. If the secretary of defense doesn't

I took a telephone call from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. He told me that he was the one who had talked Obama into running for president (a lot of people were claiming that) but there was no candidate for vice president. Reid said he was thinking about me, and that was the reason for the call. It took a lot of willpower for me to keep from bursting out laughing.

One lesson from Syria is that American presidents should not call for another leader, however odious, to relinquish power without a plan for, or some prospect of, making that happen. It severely limits political and diplomatic options.

very size and structure of the department assured ponderousness, if not paralysis, because so many different organizations had to be involved in even the smallest decisions.

Never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricane he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that, once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events." I

nearly every time Moseley and Air Force Secretary Mike Wynne came to see me, it was about a new bomber or more F-22S. Both were important capabilities for the future, but neither would play any part in the wars we were already in.

For my own job, my short list included Hillary, Colin Powell, Panetta, and New York mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricane he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that, once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.

One study showed kids, ages five to thirteen, pairs of faces of candidates from obscure elections and asked them whom they'd prefer as captain on a hypothetical boat trip. And kids picked the winner 71 percent of the time.31

How's this for a display of human kin selection: Subjects were given a scenario of a bus hurtling toward a human and a nondescript dog, and they could only save one. Whom would they pick? It depended on degree of relatedness, as one progressed from sibling (1 percent chose the dog over the sibling) to grandparent (2 percent) to distant cousin (16 percent) to foreigner (26 percent).55

in general, major stressors make people of both genders more risk taking. But moderate stressors bias men toward, and women away from, risk taking. In the absence of stress, men tend toward more risk taking than women; thus

acute stress strengthens connectivity between the frontal cortex and motoric areas, while weakening frontal-hippocampal connections; the result is decision making that is habitual, rather than incorporating new information.

In another study subjects waited an unknown length of time to receive a shock.12 This lack of predictability and control was so aversive that many chose to receive a stronger shock immediately. And

What does the frontal cortex do? Its list of expertise includes working memory, executive function (organizing knowledge strategically, and then initiating an action based on an executive decision), gratification postponement, long-term planning, regulation of emotions, and reining in impulsivity.35

When deontologism and consequentialism contemplate trolleys, the former is about moral intuitions rooted in the vmPFC, amygdala, and insula, while the latter is the domain of the dlPFC and moral reasoning. Why is it that our automatic, intuitive moral judgments tend to be nonutilitarian? Because, as Greene states in his book, "Our moral brains evolved to help us spread our genes, not to maximize our collective happiness.