Quotes About Decision-making

There is a common tendency to turn off one's imagination at certain points and refuse to contemplate the possibility of having to do certain things and cope with the attendant moral problems. The things simply get done by the social machine, and one can keep one's clear conscience and one's moral indignation unsullied.

Until the age of nine, a child doesn't need choices. Having too many choices pushes a child to grow up too soon. One of the greatest sources of stress for adults today is too many choices. Directly asking a young child what she wants puts too much pressure on the child. Always asking children what they want or how they feel weakens a parent's ability to maintain control.

The president had shifted to the 'we' mode now, something he invariably did when a potentially unpopular decision was at hand. For the easy ones, it was always 'I.' When he needed a crutch, and especially when he would need someone to blame, he opened up the decisionmaking process and included Critz.

He counts votes before he decides what to have for breakfast.

sometimes it takes balls to walk away. Do it now while you can still enjoy life.

It is often said that second thoughts are best. So they are in matters of judgment but not in matters of conscience.

A law is not good merely because the legislature wills it, but the legislature has the mortal duty to will only that which is good.

As for Jenny, she felt only that women - just like men - should at least be able to make conscious decisions about the course of their lives; if that made her a feminist, she said, then she guessed she was one.

You're always telling me I don't have any faith," I wrote to Owen. "Well—don't you see?—that's a part of what makes me so indecisive. I wait to see what will happen next—because I don't believe that anything I might decide to do would matter.

Effective decision makers are distinguished not so much by the superior extent of their knowledge as by their being aware of its limitations.

Richard Rumelt's Good Strategy/Bad Strategy

You have to do what you think is the right thing, but just make sure it's the right thing in the long run, and not just for the moment. Your war memories will be with you forever, you'll be asked about them thousands of times after the war is over.

You have to do what you think is the right thing, but just make sure it's the right thing in the long run, and not just for the moment.

Statesmen of this type know what to do and when to do it, if they are to achieve their ends, which themselves are usually not born within some private world of inner thought, or introverted feeling, but are the crystallisation, the raising to great intensity and clarity, of what a large number of their fellow citizens are thinking and feeling in some dim, inarticulate but nevertheless persistent fashion.

Xerxes tinha razão. Se tentarmos prever tudo, arriscamo-nos a não fazer nada. Mas também a tinha Artabano. Se não nos prepararmos para tudo o que pode acontecer, garantimos que alguma parte disso acontecerá.

Which raises another question: How does one know when one knows? In turn this leads to more practical questions: How does one know when to continue to push an experiment? And how does one know when to abandon a clue as a false trail?

But how does one know when to persist, when to continue to try to make an experiment work, when to make adjustments—and when finally to abandon a line of thought as mistaken or incapable of solution with present techniques?

Damasio and Bechara developed their 'Somatic Marker Hypothesis'. According to this hypothesis, each event we store in memory comes bookmarked with the bodily sensations – Damasio and Bechara call these 'somatic markers' – we felt at the time of living through it for the first time; and these help us decide what to do when we find ourselves in a similar situation.

people on average prefer to bet on their own judgment over an equally probable chance event when they consider themselves competent about the event being judged.

I believe in local control of education.

Only when you combine sound intellect with emotional discipline do you get rational behavior.

We eventually learn that emotional closure is our own action. We can be responsible for it. In any moment, we can choose to open or to close.

There are all kinds of ways to be in the world. And no matter what has happened to us, or what we have been told, or what we have believed, we get to choose our way.

You have a meeting to make a decision, not to decide on the question.