Quotes About Decision-making

In Judges, Gideon asks God how to choose his men for battle. The Lord told Gideon to take his men down to the river and drink. The men who flopped down on their bellies and drank like dogs were no good to him. Gideon watched as some of his men knelt down and drank with their heads watching the horizon, spears in hand. Though they were few, they were the men he needed.

It was the first time he'd circumvented the chain of command, going around his boss in the SOCOM Acquisition Office. With results like this he might have to do it more often.

Prioritize and execute.

The Teams had a saying: "Don't rush to your death." There was hardly ever a good reason to go barging into a target at full speed without carefully assessing the situation.

You can use charts to give you a plus or minus toward your view, but you can never start with the chart.

Place your stops at a point that, if reached, will reasonably indicate that the trade is wrong, not at a point determined primarily by the maximum dollar amount you are willing to lose per contract.

there is probably no class of trades with a higher failure rate than impulsive (not to be confused with intuitive) trades.

Before producers decided to keep things simple and call the show Friends, they toyed with the idea of Friends Like Us (ok, that's not too bad), Six of One (what?), Across the Hall (logical I guess), Insomnia Café (no, just no) and Once Upon a Time in the West Village (amazing).

Councils of war breed timidity and defeatism.

When a nation was faced with a choice between abstract principle or complete self-interest, it took self-interest every time.

The questions Wile E. Coyote—and all business leaders—must ask themselves are these: How has my environment changed? How soon must I stop doing what I have been doing? And how do I change course?

Effective people know when to stop assessing and make a tough call, even without total information. Little is worse than a manager who can't cut bait.

When you are a leader, your job is to have all the questions. You have to be incredibly comfortable looking like the dumbest person in the room. Every conversation you have about a decision, a proposal, or a piece of market information has to be filled with you saying, "What if?" and "Why not?" and "How come?

There is nothing wrong in giving those you love more choices," she added. "It is only wrong if you try to blackmail or coax them into making the choice you prefer.

I guess you'd call me an independent, since I've never identified myself with one party or another in politics. I always decide my vote by taking as careful a look as I can at the actual candidates and issues themselves, no matter what the party label.

I suspect that the vast majority of people, not knowing in advance whether they will either end up in a permanently vegetative state or be diagnosed with cancer, would prefer that any resources that would be spent on PVS care be reallocated to cancer research--or some similar enterprise that has the potential to help human beings who might actually recover.

Stand at the crossroads if you will, but if you'll not choose, I'll move on without you

I wondered what would make me stop, whether it would be hunger, sleep or boredom – in other words, what prompts decisions when you are utterly alone.

So after the tears were all cried out, it was time to move on and figure out what to do with all that was coming at me.

Economic life, not in its content but in its direction, will henceforth entirely elude popular control. No democracy is possible in the face of a perfected economic technique. the decisions of the voters, and even of the elected, are oversimplified, incoherent, and technically inadmissible. It is a grave illusion to believe that democratic control or decision-making can be reconciled with economic technique.

They are certain old qualities and flavors within you. However much you may try to pretend that you're a very nice and loving person, when deals are offered, suddenly old vasanas will take control of you. There's an urge to bite the deal.

All free governments are managed by the combined wisdom and folly of the people.

But no matter how clearly I saw what I was doing, I would go on doing it, as though I simply allowed my shame to sit there alongside my need to do it, one separate from the other. I often chose to do the wrong thing and feel bad about it rather than to do the right thing, if the wrong thing was what I wanted.

There seemed to be three choices: to give up trying to love anyone, to stop being selfish, or to learn to love a person while continuing to be selfish.