Quotes About Choice

In a way she actually preferred Peter to other people because of this. He always acted out of intelligent self-interest.

Withholding a decision is a decision.

When it comes down to it, though, the real decision is inevitable: If one of us has to be destroyed, let's make damn sure we're the ones alive at the end.

I'll become exactly the tool you want me to be, said Ender silently, but at least I wont be fooled into it. I'll do it because I choose to, not because you tricked me, you sly bastard.

When there aren't any smart decisions, I suppose you just have to pick the stupid decision you like best.

it seemed a part of her life, to step from the ancient to the modern, back and forth. She felt rather sorry for those who knew only one and not the other. It was better, she thought, to be able to select from the whole menu of human achievements than to be bound within one narrow range.

And what? What's the other choice? To passively let things happen and then say: Tut-tut, what at botch that was? Don't we all manipulate people? Even if we openly ask them to make a choice, don't we try to frame it so they'll chose as we think they should?

Free will doesn't exist. Only the illusion of free will, because the causes of our behavior are so complex that we can't trace them back. If you've got one line of dominoes knocking each other down one by one, then you can always say, Look, this domino fell because that one pushed it. But when you have an infinite number of directions, you can never find where the casual chain begins. So you think, That domino fell because it wanted to.

Welcome to the human race. Nobody controls his own life, Ender. The best you can do is choose to be controlled by good people, by people who love you.

Might-have-beens are a bitch.

How did I become the one to make this decision for everyone?

Even gentle people recognize that sometimes the decision not to kill is a decision to die.

Bienvenido a la raza humana. Nadie controla su propia vida, Ender. Lo más que puedes hacer es elegir ser controlado por personas buenas, por personas que te quieran.

Two trees—knowledge and life. You eat of the tree of knowledge, and you will surely die. You eat of the tree of life, and you remain a child in the garden forever, undying.

These children had never looked death in the face and then chosen to live anyway.

This would not have a happy ending. So Ender decided that he'd rather not be the unhappiest at the end.

Nobody controls his own life, Ender. The best you can do is choose to fill the roles given you by good people, by people who love you.

Don't we all manipulate people? Even if we openly ask them to make a choice, don't we try to frame it so they'll choose as we think they should?

We could live forever, if we were willing to be stupid the whole time. Surely you're not saying that God had to choose between long life and intelligence for human beings! It's there in your own Bible, Carlotta. Two trees — knowledge and life. You eat of the tree of knowledge, and you will surely die. You eat of the tree of life, and you remain a child in the garden forever, undying.

There's a longer view, in which life and death are less important matters than choosing what kind of life and what kind of death we have.

when everybody believes that everybody's actions are the result of free choice, and takes and gives responsibility accordingly, the result is civilization.

God gives us the freedom to do great evil, if we choose. Then he uses his own freedom to create goodness out of that evil, for that is what he chooses.

And because it was possible, there was a part of him that wanted to play it out, see where this path led. I

Orson Scott Card