Quotes About Choice

But one need not oppose abortion on moral or religious grounds to feel shaken by the notion of a private sadness being converted into a public good.

cuando una mujer no desea tener un hijo, generalmente cuenta con buenas razones para ello.

La distinción entre una mujer que elige controlar su fertilidad y el gobierno que elige limitar su fertilidad es fundamental y la gente con frecuencia parece perder de vista esta diferencia.

la mayoría de los abortos sólo cambian en que un niño no nace hoy pero otro nace unos años más tarde de la misma madre.

is a systematic means of describing how people make decisions and how they change their minds;

Why am I permitted to apply racial criteria when I select a spouse but not when I select a personal assistant?

The governing principle is precisely the same one that predicts behavior at the gas pump. When the price of gasoline is low, people choose to buy more gasoline. When the price of accidents (e.g., the probability of being killed or the expected medical bill) is low, people choose to have more accidents. You

If you find yourself mapping a "whether or not" question, you're almost always better off turning it into a "which one" question that gives you more available paths.

No one wants distortion, but choosing itself is the distortion.

When you're pushing the limits of ultimate human performance, the choice is stark: it's flow or die.

Do I agree that with privilege comes responsibility? The answer is no. I believe that responsibilities arise when one undertakes them voluntarily. I also believe that in the absence of explicit contracts, people who lecture other people on their responsibilities are almost always up to no good.

At every moment we choose, consciously or unconsciously, between good things now and better things later.

If you had to choose a moment in history to be born, and you did not know ahead of time who you would be—you didn't know whether you were going to be born into a wealthy family or a poor family, what country you'd be born in, whether you were going to be a man or a woman—if you had to choose blindly what moment you'd want to be born, you'd choose now. —Barack Obama, 2016 CHAPTER 4 PROGRESSOPHOBIA

If a person did all the work of a slave but had the option of quitting at any time without being physically restrained or punished, we would not call him a slave—and this violence was often a regular part of a slave's life.

If we could canvass the souls of the dead children and mothers and the victims of war and starvation and disease, or if we went back in time and gave them a choice between proceeding with their lives in a premodern or modern world, we might uncover an appreciation of modernity that is more commensurate with its objective benefits.

The experience of choosing is not a fiction, regardless of how the brain works. It is a real neural process, with the obvious function of selecting behavior according to its foreseeable consequences. It responds to information from the senses, including the exhortations of other people. You cannot step outside it or let it go on without you because it is you.

We have the ability to construct our own futures, albeit not in circumstances of our own choosing

The asymmetry has been confirmed in the lab by showing that people will take a bigger gamble to avoid a sure loss than to improve on a sure gain

Also, people single out freedom as a component of a meaningful life, whether or not it leads to a happy life.11 Like Frank Sinatra, they may have regrets, they may take blows, but they do it their way.

The psychologist Walter Mischel captured the conflict in an agonizing choice he gave four-year-olds in a famous 1972 experiment: one marshmallow now or two marshmallows in fifteen minutes.15 Life is a never-ending gantlet of marshmallow tests, dilemmas that force us to choose between a sooner small reward and a later large reward.

it's easier to deter people from crime if the lawful alternative is more appealing.

I'd rather have a small part in a movie I love than a bigger part in one I don't care about.

Free will, though it makes evil possible, also makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.

Let choice whisper in your ear and love murmur in your heart. Be ready. Here comes life.