Quotes About Choice

Taking care of our own "wants" and focusing on what we "want" to do does not strike me as a solution to the problem of too much choice. It is precisely so that we can, each of us, focus on our own wants that all of these choices emerged in the first place.

AWAY OF EASING THE BURDEN THAT FREEDOM OF CHOICE IMPOSES IS to make decisions about when to make decisions. These are what Cass Sunstein and Edna Ullmann-Margalit call second-order decisions. One kind of second-order decision is the decision to follow a rule.

Thus the growth of options and opportunities for choice has three, related, unfortunate effects.   It means that decisions require more effort. It makes mistakes more likely. It makes the psychological consequences of mistakes more severe.  

So, once again, satisficing appears the better way to maintain one's autonomy in the face of an overwhelming array of choices.

Pascal's Wager says that given the choice, even if the odds for success are slim, it is better for her to take the risk: there is nothing for her to lose and a lot for her to gain.

people either live in the light or walk in the darkness; they either stand for the truth or propagate error.

real reason he'd gone was the one most bad decisions have in common: it had seemed like a good idea at the time.

A mob always picked its own leaders, and it always picked the right ones.

It seemed to him that if the wrong man stepped into the marriage-loop with a woman, it was a noose instead of a ring.

All I'm saying is that your happiness is in your hands and those of your nearest and dearest. And if you think I'm going to show up two decades or so down the line to collect your soul in my moldy old pocketbook, you'd better think again. The souls of humans have become poor and transparent things.

Some things just have to be true, Scott said, because they have no other choice.

Leadership is a choice, not a position.

You must not think of them [Hebrews 12 Cloud of Witnesses] as perfect saints who never suffered as we do. Instead you must see them as the flawed and the betrayed and the wounded who simply chose to live above the programming of their pain.

When you pick up one end of the stick, you pick up the other. Therefore, if you decide to take responsibility for your circumstances, you automatically tap into the power to change

Our behavior is a function of our decisions, not our conditions.

we're responsible for our own lives.

Interdependence is a choice only independent people can make

Our ultimate freedom is the right and power to decide how anybody or anything outside ourselves will affect us.

In the space between stimulus (what happens) and how we respond, lies our freedom to choose. Ultimately, this power to choose is what defines us as human beings. We may have limited choices but we can always choose. We can choose our thoughts, emotions, moods, our words, our actions; we can choose our values and live by principles. It is the choice of acting or being acted upon.

Show me someone who is humble enough to accept and take responsibility for his or her circumstances and courageous enough to take whatever initiative is necessary to creatively work his or her through or around these challenges, and I'll show you supreme power of choice.

They [Nazi captors]had more liberty, more options to choose from in their environment; but he [Viktor Frankl] had more freedom, more internal power to exercise his options.

We are free to choose our actions, based on our knowledge of correct principles, but we are not free to choose the consequences of those actions. Remember, "If you pick up one end of the stick, you pick up the other.

This power of choice means that we are not merely a product of our past or of our genes; we are not a product of how other people treat us. They unquestionably influence us, but they do not determine us. We are self-determining through our choices. If we have given away our present to the past, do we need to give away our future also?

Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness.