Quotes About Decision-making

On some positions, cowardice asks the question, is it expedient? And then expedience comes along and asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? Conscience asks the question, is it right? There comes a time when one must take the position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must do it because conscience tells him it is right.

On some positions, Cowardice asks the question, "Is it safe?" Expediency asks the question, "Is it politic?" And Vanity comes along and asks the question, "Is it popular?" But Conscience asks the question, "Is it right?" And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must do it because Conscience tells him it is right.

On some positions, Cowardice asks the question, "Is it safe?" Expediency asks the question, "Is it politic?" And Vanity comes along and asks the question, "Is it popular?" But Conscience asks the question, "Is it right?

After that message of 23 April, the entire South Atlantic was an operational theatre for both sides. We, as professionals, said it was just too bad that we lost the Belgrano.

God had already told Adam and Eve what was right and what was wrong. But Satan said, in essence, "That's his opinion; you're entitled to your own opinion—you can make your own decisions about what is right and wrong.

Bad luck is what we conveniently call our bad choices.

sculpting is really a long series of decisions. When you make good ones, you have a product you like. When you make a bad one, you toss it and start again. And there are always lots of bad decisions. But the good ones are worth waiting for.

But love is an emotional thing, and whatever is emotional is opposed to that true cold reason which I place above all things. I should never marry myself, lest I bias my judgment.

I'm not sure about whether I shall go. I am the most incurably lazy devil that ever stood in shoe leather

You wouldn't have any idea what's going on, would you? BAYARD, shaking his head: I was walking down the street. LEBEAU: Me too. Something told me—Don't go outside today. So I went out. Weeks go by and I don't open my door. Today I go out. And I had no reason, I wasn't even going anywhere. Looks left and right to the others. To Bayard: They get picked up the same way?

What people commonly call fate is mostly their own stupidity.

If end-of-life discussions were an experimental drug, the FDA would approve it.

The result: those who saw a palliative care specialist stopped chemotherapy sooner, entered hospice far earlier, experienced less suffering at the end of their lives—and they lived 25 percent longer. In other words, our decision making in medicine has failed so spectacularly that we have reached the point of actively inflicting harm on patients rather than confronting the subject of mortality. If end-of-life discussions were an experimental drug, the FDA would approve it.

end-of-life discussions were an experimental drug, the FDA would approve it.

The seemingly easiest and most sensible rule for a doctor to follow is: Always Fight. Always look for what more you could do. (...) But our fight is not always to do more. It is to do right by our patients, even though what is right is not always clear.

In other words, our decision making in medicine has failed so spectacularly that we have reached the point of actively inflicting harm on patients rather than confronting the subject of mortality. If end-of-life discussions were an experimental drug, the FDA would approve it. Patients

HOW DID WE wind up in a world where the only choices for the very old seem to be either going down with the volcano or yielding all control over our lives?

We are running up against the difficulty of maintaining a coherent philosophical distinction between giving people the right to stop external or artificial processes that prolong their lives and giving them the right to stop the natural, internal processes that do so. At root, the debate is about what mistakes we fear most—the mistake of prolonging suffering or the mistake of shortening valued life.

Human judgment, even expert human judgment, falls well short of certainty.

we pay doctors to give chemotherapy and to do surgery but not to take the time required to sort out when to do so is unwise. This certainly is a factor. But the issue isn't merely a matter of financing. It arises from a still unresolved argument about what the function of medicine really is—what, in other words, we should and should not be paying for doctors to do.

Doctors with high confidence in a judgment they made proved no more accurate than doctors with low confidence.

human beings are inconsistent: we are easily influenced by suggestion, the order in which we see things, recent experience, distractions, and the way information is framed.

Given a choice, people wriggle out, and those choices are not offered equally.

The goal is to use explicit, logical, statistical thinking instead of just your gut.