Quotes About Choice

By properly deploying both incentives and nudges, we can improve our ability to improve people's lives, and help solve many of society's major problems. And we can do so while still insisting on everyone's freedom to choose.

One way to start to think about incentives is to ask four questions about a particular choice architecture: Who uses? Who chooses? Who pays? Who profits?

Often we can do more to facilitate good behavior by removing some small obstacle than by trying to shove people in a certain direction.

A nudge, as we will use the term, is any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people's behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. To count as a mere nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid. Nudges are not mandates.

When people have a hard time predicting how their choices will end up affecting their lives, they have less to gain by numerous options and perhaps even by choosing for themselves. A nudge might be welcomed.

Viktor Frankl concluded that in the last resort "everything can be taken from a man but one thing, the last of human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances."4

Very well then! I'll write, write write. He let the words soak into his mind and displace all else. A man had a choice, after all. He devoted his life to his work or to his wife and children and home. It could not be combined; not in this day and age. In this insane world where God was second to income and goodness to wealth.

No snow or sleet. What about people who like snow? This wouldn't be heaven to them.

Well, why not? Why not go out? It was a sure way to be free of them.

What did it matter what he did? Life would be equally purposeless no matter what his decision was.

If it had been me, I would have done the same thing, remained silent, then died.

What makes my life my own is ultimately the sheer fact that it is mine to live, mine to make something of, in the face of my possible non-existence. Every other possibility is something that I may be free not to do, and that someone else may be able to do just as well as I can. But my death is a possibility that necessarily faces me alone: no one can face it for me.

But whatever we create on our typewriters, whenever we turn to them, we're choosing something that violates the digital Paradigm—something durable, intimate, focused, and self-sufficient.

This is how it must go. There will be catastrophes. Disastrous setbacks and slaughters. But life is going someplace. It wants to know itself; it wants the power of choice. It wants solutions to problems that nothing alive yet knows how to solve, and it's willing to use even death to find them.

voices or cell phone—choose your schizophrenia.

Do you run away or toward?

When the people come for you, your choice is already made. All you can do is lift up the light God sets in your hand. That light don't belong to you anyway. It's not yours to hide.

But life is going someplace. It wants to know itself; it wants the power of choice. It wants solutions to problems that nothing alive yet knows how to solve, and it's willing to use even death to find them.

It's a programmed telephone support system for living on Earth. It's the mind moving through mysteries, their explanations forever one more choice away.

people are more likely to refrain from violence out of preference for a nonviolent existence than they are to do so out of fear of punishment.

Such a choice—to tolerate the brutalization of children as we continue to do—is equally violent and equally evil, and we reap what we sow.

So Jesus pulls no punches, saying you must "hate" your home base in some way and make choices beyond it.

I finally had to be either Roman or catholic, and I continue to choose the catholic end of that spectrum.

God does not come uninvited. God and grace cannot enter without an opening from our side, or we would be mere robots. God does not want robots, but lovers who freely choose to love in return for love. And toward that supreme end, God seems quite willing to wait, cajole, and entice.