Quotes About Decision-making

The power to shape budgets and guide policy was what we needed, and that power lay elsewhere.

It's hard, in retrospect, to understand why you did something stupid. I don't mean the small stuff—ruining your favorite tie because you tried to eat soup in the car or throwing out your back because you got talked into playing tackle football on Thanksgiving. I mean dumb choices in the wake of considerable deliberation: those times when you identify a real problem in your life, analyze it, and then with utter confidence come up with precisely the wrong answer

I would be able to articulate a vision and set a direction for the country; promote a healthy organizational culture and establish clear lines of responsibility and measures of accountability. I would be the one who made the final decisions on issues that rose to my attention and who explained those decisions to

Gates recommended against a raid, although he was open to considering the strike option. He raised the precedent of the April 1980 attempt to rescue the fifty-three American hostages held in Iran, known as Desert One, which had turned catastrophic after a U.S. military helicopter crashed in the desert, killing eight servicemembers. It was a reminder, he said, that no matter how thorough the planning, operations like this could go badly wrong.

After we're finished, we should try something simpler," I said to him one day. "We could move our families to Hawaii and open a smoothie stand on the beach." "Smoothies are too complicated," Rahm said. "We'll sell T-shirts. But just white T-shirts. In medium. That's it—no other colors or patterns or sizes. We don't want to have to make any decisions. If customers want something different, they can go someplace else.

I reminded myself that every president felt saddled with the previous administration's choices and mistakes, that 90 percent of the job was navigating inherited problems and unanticipated crises. Only if you did that well enough, with discipline and purpose, did you get a real shot at shaping the future.

Rarely do your efforts bear fruit right away; the scale of most problems coming across your desk is too big for that, the factors at play too varied.

Congress had come to effectively require 60 votes in the Senate, or what was often referred to as a "supermajority.

We were not supposed to know anything about our own bodies or to participate in decision-making about our own care.

Was it normal now for parents to operate in the dark? She never knew what was fair to ask.

White men tell us: Vote, bantu! They tell us: You do not all have to agree, ce n'est pas nécessaire! If two men vote yes and one says no, the matter is finished. Á bu, even a child can see how that will end. It takes three stones in the fire to hold up the pot. Take one away, leave the other two, and what? The pot will spill into the fire.

To the Congolese (including Anatole himself, he confessed) it seems odd that if one man gets fifty votes and the other gets forty-nine, the first one wins altogether and the second one plumb loses. That means almost half the people will be unhappy, and according to Anatole, in a village that's left halfway unhappy you haven't heard the end of it. There is sure to be trouble somewhere down the line.

Well, why were they dumb enough to vote for Leah anyway, is what I asked Nelson. If they knew it was going to get Tata Kuvudundu so riled up? Nelson said some of them that voted for her were put out with Tata Ndu, and some were put out with Father, so everybody ended up getting what they didn't want, and now had to go along with it. Nobody even cares that much one way or another about Leah, is what Nelson said. Oh, well, I told him. That is what we call Democracy.

If I got to make just one law, it would be that the men who make the decisions to drop bombs would first, every time, have to spend one whole day taking care of a baby. We were not made to do this killing thing. I swear. Back up. It's a big mistake.

Marry in haste, repent at leisure,' she said, remembering her brother's words of warning. Damn my stubbornness, she muttered.

If he were a philosopher king or a benevolent dictator, the only jobs he thought he might enjoy more than his current occupation, he'd have a rule that you could only authorize a war if you were actually going to go off and personally fight it. That'd get the politicians singing "Kumbaya" right quick.

He called you. You're the one who insists on carrying a phone." The moment it came out, he regretted it. When Delilah was pissed, there was no winning move. Your only option was to try to find a way not to play.

We are free to be the authors of our own lives, but we don't know what kind of lives we want to 'write.

ECONOMISTS POINT OUT THAT THE QUALITY OF ANY GIVEN OPTION can not be assessed in isolation from its alternatives. One of the "costs" of any option involves passing up the opportunities that a different option would have afforded. This is referred to as an opportunity cost.

keeping options open seems to extract a psychological price. When we can change our minds, apparently we do less psychological work to justify the decision we've made, reinforcing the chosen alternative and disparaging the rejected ones.

IT IS MAXIMIZERS WHO SUFFER MOST IN A CULTURE THAT PROVIDES too many choices.

So it seems that neither our predictions about how we will feel after an experience nor our memories of how we did feel during the experience are very accurate reflections of how we actually do feel while the experience is occurring. And yet it is memories of the past and expectations for the future that govern our choices.

But by restricting our options, we will be able to choose less and feel better.

Even though we don't expect it to happen, such adaptation to pleasure is inevitable, and it may cause more disappointment in a world of many choices than in a world of few.