Quotes About Decision-making

Don't think too much. That makes you believe you have more choices than you do. Then you mind becomes confused.

You can't have intentions without consequences. The question is, who pays for the consequences? Saving fish from drowning. Same thing. Who's saved? Who's not?

I thought about things, the pros and cons. But in the end I would be so confused, because I never believed there was ever any one right answer, yet there were many wrong ones.

If my father had been working at the 7-Eleven in Wyoming last night, what would he have done? Would he have gone for Elroy's vital-organ zones? Or would he have aimed for his elbows, knees, and shoulders?

North Korean rulers do what they are doing not because they are "evil" or driven by some delusionary ideologies, but rather

Grace Hopper: It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.

As a turning point, the Bay of Pigs deserves comparison with 9/11 - a moment that created an opening to pose first-order questions, but elicited instead an ill-conceived, reflexive response. As would Johnson, Carter, and George W. Bush, Kennedy in 1961 squandered an opportunity to rethink and reorient U.S. policy, with fateful implications.

When I get logical, and I don't trust my instincts - that's when I get in trouble.

Carmen hated the 'life is too short rationalization. She thought it was one of the lamer excuses in the history of excuse-making. Whenever you did something because life is too short not to, you could be sure life would be just long enough to punish you for it.

How staunchly people rationalized the things they had, even (especially) if they didn't choose them.

The moment we catch sight of the stream of causes that precede their conscious decisions, reaching back into childhood and beyond, their culpability begins to disappear.

President Bush

You are not in control of your mind—because you, as a conscious agent, are only part of your mind, living at the mercy of other parts.15 You can do what you decide to do—but you cannot decide what you will decide to do.

My favorite buyer program is one called Eat What You Cook. Once a quarter, every buyer has to go out to a different store and act as manager for a couple of days in the department he or she buys merchandise for. I guarantee you that after they've eaten what they cooked enough times, these buyers don't load up too many Moon Pies to send to Wisconsin, or beach towels for Hiawatha, Kansas.

JIM WALTON: "Dad always said you've got to stay flexible. We never went on a family trip nor have we ever heard of a business trip in which the schedule wasn't changed at least once after the trip was underway. Later, we all snickered at some writers who viewed Dad as a grand strategist who intuitively developed complex plans and implemented them with precision. Dad thrived on change, and no decision was ever sacred.

In the global economy, successful business is going to do just what Wal-Mart is always trying to do: give more and more responsibility for making decisions to the people who are actually on the firing line, those who deal with the customers every day.

In "A Problem from Hell," I had highlighted the work of Albert Hirschman, the Princeton economist who published the landmark book The Rhetoric of Reaction in 1991. Hirschman's thesis was that those who didn't want to pursue a particular course of action tended to argue that a given policy would be futile ("futility"), that it would likely make matters worse ("perversity"), or that it would imperil some other goal ("jeopardy").

when I chaired meetings in 2009 to consider whether our administration should take a fresh position on something, I often heard one of two entrenched views: We never do that, or We always do that. The past was prologue: those who had conceived of policies in a certain way were ill disposed to try something new.

As my doubts about whether to move to the Balkans lingered, I devised a test for myself that I have used many times since. The test, as I put it then, was as follows: If I end up not making it as a journalist, will something else I learn in the process make it worth trying? I would come to call this the in trying for Y, the most I accomplish is X test, or the X test.

When USUN diplomats committed the cardinal sin of 'admiring the problem,' I would handwrite on their memos, 'If you were Obama, what would you do?' (p. 350).

There is no matter what children should learn first, any more than what leg you should put into your breeches first. Sir, you may stand disputing which is best to put in first, but in the meantime your backside is bare. Sire, while you stand considering which of two things you should teach your child first, another boy has learn't 'em both.

In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.

When will people learn that just because you can make something doesn't mean you should?

Allowing yourself to stop reading a book - at page 25, 50, or even, less frequently, a few chapters from the end - is a rite of passage in a reader's life, the literary equivalent of a bar mitzvah or a communion, the moment at which you look at yourself and announce: Today I am an adult. I can make my own decisions.