Quotes About Choice

I don't think, contrary to fashionable opinion, that genes play the only role, and I feel acute boredom whenever I hear another round of the current debate between Gay Pride advocates and Fundamentalists about whether homosexuality (or heterosexuality, if you think about it) results from genes (alone) or "choice" (alone.) That particular either/or seems even dumber to me than most Aristotelian dualisms.

George has other reasons. "A junkie," George says, "has no choice. He's hooked. But somebody who isn't an addict, somebody who has the freedom to say 'yes' or 'no,' has to be crazy to take a pill or powder admittedly manufactured illegally and put it in his mouth. There is just no way of knowing what you're getting.

Maybe the world is like a cock-eyed room, and when we cannot believe what we see, we see what we can believe, choosing among hallucinations.

Somehow, to me at least, either of those logics seem to fit the enigmas of our existence, here in the cock-eyed room of primate perceptor organs, better than Aristotelian yes/no choices. Of course, if after long analysis, some experiences can finally be reduced to an Aristotelian choice, that is convenient. But starting from the Aristotelian either/or may be rather constricting or strangulating.

You can live in the reality-tunnel imprinted upon you by environmental accident or you can choose your own. You can go through brain changes as radically bad as those of Patty Hearst and Rusty Calley, as transcendentally beautiful as those of Buddha and Jesus, as epistemologically revolutionary as those of Darwin and Einstein.

What if you could be young again and were able to undo the things that were done that made you into the person you would later become. But then who would you be.

There were worse things than being in love with two women. Better than being in love with none.

You do the best you can and you deal with the consequences. It's all there is.

The fight must so have seemed in that fell cirque, What penned them there, with all the plain to choose? No footprint leading to that horrid mews, None out of it. Mad brewage set to work Their brains, no doubt, like galley-slaves the Turk Pits for his pastime, Christians against Jews.

it was his choice. To be a witness, to observe, to let the events be recorded within himself on some personal film in some secret compartment no one knew about, except him.

he had never felt left out: it was his choice. To be a witness, to observe, to let the events be recorded within himself on some personal film in some secret compartment no one knew about, except him.

When long-term convicts were first released they often experienced a form of agoraphobia—a fear of open spaces. The prison counselors had a special name for this type of agoraphobia when they attributed it to convicts—the fear of life. Freedom gave a man choices and choices could be terrifying. Every choice was a potential failure.

Jon started up the steps, and then he was gone. Amy wouldn't see him at first. She'd be lost in her thoughts, checking off the rational steps that led to her rational death, and each of those steps would make perfect, inevitable sense. Until she saw Jon. Everything would change when she saw him. Jon would offer a different path.

I left them to their lives and walked out into the sun. You want to do the right thing, but sometimes there is no right thing to be done.

The forgiveness process, properly understood and used, can free those bound by anger and resentment. It does not require accepting injustice or remaining in an abusive situation. It opens the door to reconciliation, but it does not require trusting someone who has proven untrustworthy. Even if the offender remains unrepentant, you can forgive and restore a sense of peace and well-being to your life. The choice is yours.

Forgiving is a choice. It is a gift given to someone who doesn't deserve it.

psychopaths are rational and aware of what they are doing and why. Their behavior is the result of choice, freely exercised.

keep in mind always Isaiah Berlin's admonition from his celebrated lecture delivered in 1953, and published the following year under the title "Historical Inevitability," in which he condemns as immoral and cowardly the belief that vast impersonal forces such as geography, the environment, and ethnic characteristics determine our lives and the direction of world politics.

Parents with less than a high school education endorse obedience over self-reliance, 65 percent to 18 percent, whereas parents with a graduate education make exactly the opposite choice, 70 percent to 19 percent.

Takes a while for a person to decide what they like best. Some folks never do decide. Always changing their mind, back and forth.

Thinking is not to agree or disagree. That's voting.

The middle of the road is where the white line is—and that's the worst place to drive.

So I took the road less traveled by and that has made all the difference.

I shall make the reckless choice Some day when they are in voice And tossing so as to scare The white clouds over them on. I shall have less to say, But I shall be gone.