Decision And Consequence Quotes & Sayings

Only those who must bear the consequences of a decision have the right to make it. — Starhawk

I could reply. I could tell him that a metaphor is inadequate in the face of a bloodbath. That a Platonic inclination for dying doesn't balance out the serious decision to kill. That through the ages there has never been a great historical infamy committed for which there couldn't be found a symbol just as big, to justify it. That, in consequence, we would do well to pay attention to great certainties, to great invocations, to the great 'droughts' and 'rains'. That the temper of our most violent outbursts might benefit from a shade less enthusiasm.
I could reply. But what good would it do? I have a simple, resigned, inexplicable sensation that everything that is happening is in the normal order of things and that I am awaiting a season that will come and pass
because it has come and passed before. — Mihail Sebastian

Every easy choice will have its consequence tomorrow. — Meryl Streep

Since procrastination is a message from our natural willpower via low motivation, the cure is changing the environment, or one's profession, by selecting one in which one does not have to fight one's impulses. Few can grasp the logical consequence that, instead, one should lead a life in which procrastination is good, as a naturalistic-risk-based form of decision making. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I was stunned. I was, and I knew it, an ordinary person who long after he was grown retained the childhood assumption that the people who largely control our lives are somehow better informed than, and have judgment superior to, the rest of us; that they are more intelligent. Not until Vietnam did I finally realize that some of the most important decisions of all time can be made by men knowing really no more than, and who are not more intelligent than, most of the rest of us. That it was even possible that my own opinions and judgment could be as good as and maybe better than a politician's who made a decision of profound consequence. — Jack Finney

Regret doesn't make sense to me. I have none. Because I realize that what I do at any given moment, is my decision to make, already accepting either benefit or consequence of that action. So, regret is a useless word, and knowledge is the result. — Gypsie M. Holley

The difficulty is not making a decision, it's living with the consequences. — Micah Baldwin

Strong moral arguments exist for why we should often try to ignore stereotypes or override them. But we shouldn't assume they represent some irrational quirk of the unconscious mind. In fact, they're largely the consequence of the mind's attempt to make a rational decision. — Paul Bloom

Far from being a sum of distinct and partial results, victory is the consequence of efforts, some of which are victorious while others appear to be fruitless, which nevertheless all aim at a common goal, all drive at a common result: namely, at a decision, a conclusion which alone can provide victory. — Ferdinand Foch

In recent decades, "pluralism" has become something of a buzzword. It is variously employed. Often it is used to argue that no normative ethic, even of the vaguest and most tentative sort, can be "imposed" in our public life. In practice this means that public policy decisions reflect a surrender of the normal to the abnormal, of the dominant to the deviant. Indeed it is of more than passing interest that terms such as abnormal or deviant have been largely exorcised from polite vocabulary among the elites in American life. The displacement of the constitutive by the marginal is not so much the result of perverse decision makers as it is the inevitable consequence of a polity and legal system in which the advantage of initiative lies with the offended. — Richard John Neuhaus

I think Pakistan was not a factor in terms of decision India to obtain nuclear weapon. Because there was no talk of Pakistan having any capability. The main factor was China. And the international prestige that China was getting as a consequence of having its own nuclear weapons. — Subramanian Swamy

I often ask myself whether my decision to pursue a life of scholarship -- if decision is the right word -- was a result of an essential poverty of the soul, or if the desiccation which I sometimes suspect is the one truly distinguishing mark of my scholarship was an inevitable consequence of that decision. — John Banville

Tennis taught me so many lessons in life. One of the things it taught me is that every ball that comes to me, I have to make a decision. I have to accept responsibility for the consequences every time I hit a ball. — Billie Jean King

The fact that you have a policy of such consequence directly affecting millions of people and you have a legal question of great consequence about the scope of the president's authority to act in implementing the immigration laws in this way and you have a one-line decision from the court affirming by an equally-divided court, it's an inevitable consequence of where we are. — Donald Verrilli Jr.

We would all like to see a perfect moral state with no government being necessary at all. That is not reality. To the extent government is necessary, it is desirable, to keep us from each other's throats, to keep the powerful from winning every dispute by virtue of their wealth. 'Might makes right' is not only no way to run a country, it is the opposite of a perfectly moral state. It is, in fact, what you claim to oppose: the decision-maker answerable to no one, who suffers no consequence for his errors. You say it is wrong for government not to feel the pain of loss when it makes mistakes. You say it is wrong for the private citizen to suffer the consequences. And yet you place that same power in the hands of the wealthy without complaint. Why? — Robert Peate

My point taken further is that True and False (hence what we call "belief") play a poor, secondary role in human decisions; it is the payoff from the True and the False that dominates-and it is almost always asymmetric, with one consequence much bigger than the other, i.e., harboring positive and negative asymmetries (fragile or antifragile). Let me explain. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

You can't live life without consequences. They occur regardless of the decision. A consequence is an outcome, good or bad. You can live life without regrets and thats what makes it worth it. Or you could live with regret and end up hanging yourself but thats still good. You paid for the rope so your feeding someones family. Something to be proud of before you kick the bucket — George Orwell

Creating new people, by having babies, is so much a part of human life that it is rarely thought even to require a justification. Indeed, most people do not even think about whether they should or should not make a baby. They just make one. In other words, procreation is usually the consequence of sex rather than the result of a decision to bring people into existence. Those who do indeed decide to have a child might do so for any number of reasons, but among these reasons cannot be the interests of the potential child. One can never have a child for that child's sake. — David Benatar

Every decision has a consequence. — Damon Darrell

Decision-making compresses trial-and-error learning experiences into an instantaneous mental evaluation about what the consequence of a particular action will be for a given situation. It requires the on-line integration of information from diverse sources: perceptual information about the stimulus and situation, relevant facts and experiences stored in memory, feedback from emotional systems and the physiological consequences of emotional arousal, expectations about the consequences of different courses of action, and the like. This sort of integrative processing, as we've seen is the business of working memory circuits in the prefrontal cortex. In chapters 7 and 8 , we discussed the role of the prefrontal cortex in working memory and considered the contribution of the lateral and medial prefrontal cortex. Here, we will focus on two of the subareas of the medial prefrontal cortex in light of their relation to the motive circuits outlined above. — Joseph E. Ledoux

Little decisions shape big consequences. — Mehek Bassi

Hindsight is of little value in the decision-making process. It distorts our memory for events that occurred at the time of the decision so that the actual consequence seems to have been a "foregone conclusion." Thus, it may be difficult to learn from our mistakes. — Diane F. Halpern

First, the only certainty is that there is no certainty. Second, every decision as a consequence is a matter of weighing probabilities. Third, despite uncertainty we must decide and we must act. And lastly we need to judge decisions not only on the results, but how those decisions were made. — Robert Rubin

Every act has a consequence, Ellie. In my view the world divides into people who can see that, and make a decision accordingly, and those who just go for what feels good at the time. — Jojo Moyes

The situation is caused by the legal structure which gives the community no control over who buys the house lots. One consequence is that there are many absentee landlords who often do not participate in community decision-making, thus creating an inability to move forward, particularly on issues for which the law requires unanimity. The legislation also fails to provide an adequate framework for the management of the common land. — Christine Connelly

There are no simple answers in life. There is a good and bad in everyone and everything. No decision is made without consequence. No road is taken that doesn't lead to another. What's important is that those roads always be kept open, for there's no telling what wonder they might lead to. — D.J. MacHale

Going against the tide has never been difficult for me. It wasn't even a conscious decision but the natural consequence of following my own instinct. — Lewis Gordon

Making a decision isn't about knowing every potential consequence. It's about knowing what you want and chasing a path that takes you in that direction — Malinda Lo

If you sat with a pencil and jotted down all the decisions you've taken in the past week, or, if you could, over your lifetime, you would realize that almost all of them have had asymmetric payoff, with one side carrying a larger consequence than the other. You decide principally based on fragility, not probability. Or to rephrase, You decide principally based on fragility, not so much on True/False. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Design is a field of concern, response, and enquiry as often as decision and consequence ... it is convenient to group design into three simple categories, though the distinctions are in no way absolute, nor are they always so described: product design (things), environment design (places) and communication design (messages). — Norman Potter

No decision is so fine as to not bind us to its consequences. No consequence is so unexpected as to absolve us of our decisions. Not even death. — R. Scott Bakker