Quotes About Choice

we have to accept the lives we've lived. Not imagine lives we might have lived.

I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.

For people who like that sort of thing, that's the sort of thing they like.

This does not matter. This is not anything yet. It all depends on what you do with it, afterward.

no man is ever free and probably could not bear it if he were...

be.—Yes he thought Between grief and nothing I will take grief.

Freedom comes with the decision: it does not wait for the act.

a creature cloistered now by deliberate choice and still in the throes of enforced apprenticeship to, rather than voluntary or even acquiescent participation in, breathing

It was not for an outrage that they grieved, but for simple grief: the only alternative to which was nothing, and between grief and nothing only the coward takes nothing.

Any live man is better than any dead man.

It is any man's privilege to destroy himself

That's what throws a man off—that extra alternative. Just when he has come to realize that living consists in choosing wrongly between two alternatives, to have to choose among three.

Between grief and nothing, I will take grief

His WIFE, understanding everything, wants him to stay. MARVIN wants to go. Or MARVIN wants to stay. She wants him to go. Anyway, he's going.)

Privacy, self-reliance, choice -- all these can and must remina core American values. Yet so too must we remember that other core American value, the value of community. And we must redefine community more broadly to include not just our street or our tract, but our town, our metropolis, our region.

A man's damnation is his own damned business.

he chose, not the disquieting road to serenity, but the serenely narrow path to eventual and total derangement.

Nothing can be given, which cannot also be withheld.

might not know art but they knew what they liked

Imagine an alien, Fox said, who's come here to identify the planet's dominant form of intelligence. The alien has s look, then chooses. What do you think he picks? I probably shrugged. The zaibatsus, Fox said, the multinationals. The blood of a zaibatsu is information, not people. The structure is independent of the individual lives that comprise it. Corporation as life form. Not the Edge lecture again, I said.

I want to have my cake and eat it too.

What kind of human person has a favorite eraser?

O que vocês preferem — ter regras e estar de acordo, ou caçar e matar?

But just as he knew the sun was obliged to rise each morning in the east, no matter how much a western arisal might have pleased it, so he knew that Buttercup was obliged to spend her love on him. Gold was inviting, and so was royalty, but they could not match the fever in his heart, and sooner or later she would have to catch it. She had less choice than the sun.