Quotes About Decision-making

The oil business, as Erickson understood it, was and had always been amoral.

After a bad opening, there is hope for the middle game. After a bad middle game, there is hope for the endgame. But once you are in the endgame, the moment of truth has arrived

Too many kings can ruin an army

If there was one truth Evie had learned in her short life, it was that forgiveness was easier to seek than permission. She didn't plan to ask for either one.

..More choices in a limited time didn't mean didn't mean you could do everything-it meant that you could do anything, so you probably did nothing, frozen with indecision.

The truth is there are always three choices: the right one, the wrong one and the one that is called "No Choice". As you may guessed, the "No Choice" one is a rule of a bad interpreter.

The honest truth is that if this government were to propose the massacre of the first-born, it would still have no difficulty in getting it through the Commons.

He'd realized the importance of that, of making sure everybody was in on every decision and being on the same page aesthetically with him—and behind the sentiment of the song.

here I'm finally doing this thing that I've known I should be doing since I was in eleventh grade. I was certain, like all of us were, that we were doing the right thing.

She believed that it was important to put trust in children, to hand over the reins to them from time to time, to let them decide things for themselves.

Then I reminded myself that I was always willing to listen to arguments in favor of avoiding an unpleasant chore, and I shook my head.

They wring their hands, should I do this, should I do that. They get seventeen different opinions. Then they do what they planned to do all along. If you give advice, they only blame you when it turns out bad.

There was still chicken on the bone but sometimes you just have to push the plate away.

Everybody wants the chance to do the right thing, Hirsch. It makes them feel good inside. Even if doing it doesn't exactly fit inside the rules, sometimes you have to rely on the voice inside that tells you what to do.

Nobody smart knows what they want to do until they get into their twenties or thirties.

All human behavior has a reason. All behavior is solving a problem.

Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough.

Largely through science, billions of us live in one small world, densely packed and intercommunicating. But science cannot help us decide what to do with that world, or how to live. Science can make a nuclear reactor, but it cannot tell us not to build it. Science can make pesticide, but cannot tell us not to use it. And our world starts to seem polluted in fundamental ways—air, and water, and land—because of ungovernable science.

Presidents and generals and all the important people in position to make the most important decisions are, by and large, the least equipped for making them.

Largely through science, billions of us live in one small world, densely packed and intercommunicating. But science cannot help us decide what to do with that world, or how to live. Science can make a nuclear reactor, but it cannot tell us not to use it. And our world starts to seem polluted in fundamental ways--air, and water, and land--because of ungovernable science.

You imagine wonderful things and you imagine terrible things, and you take no responsibility for the choice.

He's one of those smart, drifty young people who, after certain deliberations, decides he wants to do Something in the Arts but won't, possibly can't, think in terms of an actual job; who seems to imagine that youth and brains and willingness will simply summon an occupation, the precise and perfect nature of which will reveal itself in its own time.

Peace was not the absence of conflict; it was having the courage to face the conflict and make the right choices.

Orchestration is the elimination of discretion, or choice, at the operating level of your business.