Quotes About Choice

that I myself have said no.

we had not chosen who that cardiologist would be.

If offered the option to have someone more experienced, I certainly would have taken it. But that was simply how the system worked—no such choices were offered—and so I went along. What else could I do?

Given a choice, people wriggle out, and those choices are not offered equally.

They belong to the connected and the knowledgeable, to insiders over outsiders, to the doctor's child but not the truck driver's. If choice cannot go to everyone, maybe it is better when it is not allowed at all.

So what else was there but to biopsy?

and when we decide by instinct

No one would have faulted him for doing either.

But now the problem we face is ineptitude, or maybe it's "eptitude"—making sure we apply the knowledge we have consistently and correctly. Just making the right treatment choice among the many options for a heart attack patient can be difficult, even for expert clinicians.

You must decide whether you want a DO-CONFIRM checklist or a READ-DO checklist.

No one was thinking of any better options

The professionals and institutions we turn to should...not confine people's choices, in the name of safety, but to expand them, in the name of living a worthwhile life.

there's always something. We want these choices. But that doesn't mean we are eager to make the choices ourselves. Instead, most often, we make no choice at all. We fall back on the default, and the default is: Do Something. Fix Something. Is there any way out of this? There

For all these reasons, the operation is at best a last resort

The alternative was to do nothing.

We are running up against the difficulty of maintaining a coherent philosophical distinction between giving people the right to stop external or artificial processes that prolong their lives and giving them the right to stop the natural, internal processes that do so

So the night before the operation he did an unusual thing: he discussed the treatment options with her and let her choose.

But in my grandfather's premodern world, how he wanted to live was his choice, and the family's role was to make it possible.

in my grandfather's premodern world, how he wanted to live was his choice, and the family's role was to make it possible.

Patients ask questions, look up information on the Internet, seek second opinions. And they decide.

Sometimes, of course, the difference between one option and another isn't especially significant.

Wilson is still trying to work out how ordinary people can age without having to choose between neglect and institutionalization. It remains among the most uncomfortable questions we face.

All we ask is to be allowed to remain the writers of our own story.

The value of autonomy Ã¢â'¬Â¦ lies in the scheme of responsibility it creates: autonomy makes each of us responsible for shaping his own life according to some coherent and distinctive sense of character, conviction, and interest. It allows us to lead our own lives rather than be led along them, so that each of us can be, to the extent such a scheme of rights can make this possible, what he has made himself." All