Decision Quotes - page 68
It is no longer the case in the United States that you go to the doctor and the doctor tells you what to do. Instead... the doctor tells you "Well we could do A or we could do B. A has these benefits and these risks. B has these benefits and these risks. What do you want to do?" ...We call it patient autonomy... but what it really is, is a shifting of the burden and responsibility for decision making from somebody who knows something... to someone who knows nothing and is almost certainly sick, and thus not in the best shape to be making decisions...
Barry Schwartz
The U.S. government directed, as Craig Murray so eloquently documented, the London prosecutor James Lewis. Lewis presented these directives to Baraitser. Baraitser adopted them as her legal decision. It was judicial pantomime. Lewis and the judge insisted they were not attempting to criminalize journalists and muzzle the press while they busily set up the legal framework to criminalize journalists and muzzle the press. And that is why the court worked so hard to mask the proceedings from the public, limiting access to the courtroom to a handful of observers and making it hard and at times impossible to access the trial online. It was a tawdry show trial, not an example of the best of English jurisprudence but the Lubyanka.
Julian Assange
The cunning of Julian Assange's strategy is that he has made everyone complicit in his own private decision to try to sabotage U.S. foreign policy. Unless you consider yourself bound by the hysterically stupid decision of the Obama administration to forbid all federal employees from downloading or viewing the WikiLeaks papers, you will at the very least have indulged in a certain amount of guilty pleasure.
Julian Assange
The world is a scene changing so rapidly that it takes every bit of intuitive ability you have, every brain cell each one of you has, to make the sensible decision about what to do next. You cannot rely upon what you have been taught. All you have learned from history is old ways of making mistakes. There is nothing that history can tell you about what we must do tomorrow. Only what we must not do.
Edwin H. Land
I realized that we all need a word to anchor ourselves to the focus of Constant and Never-ending Improvement. When we create a word, we encode meaning and create a way of thinking. The words that we use consistently make up the fabric of how we think and even affect our decision making. As a result of this understanding, I created a simple mnemonic: CANI!™ (pronounced kuhn-EYE), which stands for Constant And Never-ending Improvement.
Anthony Robbins
When there isn't enough food, the body has to make a decision on how to invest the limited foodstuff available to it. Survival comes first, growth comes second. And in this kind of nutritional triage, the body seems obliged to rank learning, last. It sort of it's better to be stupid and alive, than smart and dead.
Carl Sagan
I support a great deal of what the President has done. I have voted with him 80% of the time. But my promise before God to apply impartial justice required that I put my personal feelings and biases aside. Were I to ignore the evidence that has been presented, and disregard what I believe my oath and the Constitution demands of me for the sake of a partisan end, it would, I fear, expose my character to history's rebuke and the censure of my own conscience.
I am aware that there are people in my party and in my state who will strenuously disapprove of my decision, and in some quarters, I will be vehemently denounced. I am sure to hear abuse from the President and his supporters. Does anyone seriously believe I would consent to these consequences other than from an inescapable conviction that my oath before God demanded it of me?
Mitt Romney
Scores of courts, the President's own Attorneys General, state election officials, both Republican and Democrat, have reached that unequivocal decision. And in light of today's sad circumstances, I ask my colleagues, do we weigh our own political fortunes more heavily than we weigh the strength of our republic, the strength of our democracy, and the cause of freedom? What's the weight of personal acclaim compared to the weight of conscience? Leader McConnell said that the vote today is the most important in his 36 years of public service. Think of that. Authorizing two wars, voting in two impeachments. He said that not because the vote reveals something about the election, it's because this vote reveals something about us. I urge my colleagues to move forward with completing the electoral count, to refrain from further objections, and to unanimously affirm the legitimacy of the Presidential election.
Mitt Romney
I have said that nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction. The life, the opinions, are not the work, for it is in the tension between standing apart and being involved that the imagination transforms both. Let me give some minimal account of myself. I am what I suppose would be called a natural writer. I did not make any decision to become one. I did not, at the beginning, expect to earn a living by being read. I wrote as a child out of the joy of apprehending life through my senses - the look and scent and feel of things; and soon out of the emotions that puzzled me or raged within me and which took form, found some enlightenment, solace and delight, shaped in the written word.
Nadine Gordimer
The Court has done what it has never done before: expressly take away a constitutional right that is so fundamental to so many Americans that had already been recognized.The Court's decision to do so will have real and immediate consequences. State laws banning abortion are automatically taking effect today, jeopardizing the health of millions of women, some without exceptions.
Joe Biden
The initial impulse was just liking it in other books. ... Also, coming from a community that felt voiceless in the larger scheme of things-as far as movies and literature, as far as representation goes-it felt like the right decision to have a whole bunch of voices come out, as opposed to one or two.
Tommy Orange
Ted Abernathy was just one strike away from pocketing a 5-4 Cub decision over the Pirates when he found himself in a head-to-head battle with Roberto Clemente. This was the ninth inning in Chicago and there were two outs, none on. Abernathy had Clemente no balls and two strikes, but apparently the Pirate slugger worried the Cub reliever and he grew too careful. He threw three balls and then Clemente put on a dazzling display of bat control. Abernathy threw eight straight strikes and Clemente fouled off every pitch, seven to right field. Then he drew a walk and Willie Stargell, who always hits Abernathy, hit him again. Abernathy worked the count to 3-and-1 and Stargell fouled two pitches, then rammed a long, line-drive double high off the center field wall to score Clemente from first with the tying run. The Bucs won it with four runs in the eleventh, but it was Clemente who saved it with his remarkable performance.
Roberto Clemente
There is certainly a very large decision to be made by humanity when we are faced with it, and there are many reactionary forces in the world resistant to change. War and the production of armaments is a very lucrative business for some people who will resist change to the last. The present world economic collapse (presented as a 'downturn' or 'recession') is in fact the signs of the end of the old order, and is already bringing about a change in attitude among many people, young and old. When these same people hear Maitreya speak of the need to simplify and share resources to attain peace through justice, they will respond willingly to His call. His teaching and advocacy will inspire a huge response of desire for sharing, justice and thus peace. It is up to ourselves, we have to want peace enough to relinquish the past and work for the one humanity. I am sure we shall do so.
Benjamin Creme
The GNU GPL is not Mr. Nice Guy. It says "no" to some of the things that people sometimes want to do. There are users who say that this is a bad thing - that the GPL "excludes" some proprietary software developers who "need to be brought into the free software community."
But we are not excluding them from our community; they are choosing not to enter. Their decision to make software proprietary is a decision to stay out of our community. Being in our community means joining in cooperation with us; we cannot "bring them into our community" if they don't want to join.
What we can do is offer them an inducement to join. The GNU GPL is designed to make an inducement from our existing software: "If you will make your software free, you can use this code." Of course, it won't win 'em all, but it wins some of the time.
Richard Stallman
Your Yes to God demands your No to all injustice, to all evil, to all lies, to all oppression and violation of the weak and the poor, to all godlessness and mocking of the holy. Your Yes to God demands a brave No to everything that will ever hinder you from serving God alone, whether it be your profession, your property, your house, your honor before the world. Faith means decision.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Today's novelist is not only limited by the thin subject matter of personal experience, but by the pinched clinical conventions of the Health generation. Faced with Othello, say, he would have to divide the man into departments, like a liberal arts course. Race relations - that's still a subject, although of course whites can't write about blacks and vice versa; sexual politics (somehow); Othello's ultimate therapy and decision to endure. Since jealousy is now curable, like TB, we can't have people dying of it anymore. A few rap sessions, some fearless touching, and a new sense of self-worth would have Othello and Iago and Hamlet and Juliet back on their feet in no time; and Fiction struggling.
Wilfrid Sheed
Lincoln spoke in solace for all who fought upon this field; and the years have laid their balm upon their wounds. Men who wore the blue and men who wore the gray are here together, a fragment spared by time. They are brought here by the memories of old divided loyalties, but they meet here in united loyalty to a united cause which the unfolding years have made it easier to see. All of them we honor, not asking under which flag they fought then - thankful that they stand together under one flag now. Lincoln was commander-in-chief in this old battle; he wanted above all things to be commander-in-chief of the new peace. He understood that battle there must be; that when a challenge to constituted government is thrown down, the people must in self-defense take it up; that the fight must be fought through to a decision so clear that it is accepted as being beyond recall.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Only the final results can prove whether military autocracies or Parliamentary Governments are more likely - take them for all in all - to preserve the welfare and safety of great nations. If the result is inconclusive, the conflict will be renewed after an uneasy interval. But when an absolute decision is obtained the system of the victors - whoever they are - will probably be adopted to a very great extent by the vanquished.
Winston Churchill
Today we are entering a new era for our country and its people. Today we celebrate not the victory of a party, but a victory for all the people of South Africa.
Our country has arrived at a decision. Among all the parties that contested the elections, the overwhelming majority of South Africans have mandated the African National Congress to lead our country into the future. The South Africa we have struggled for, in which all our people, be they African, Coloured, Indian or White, regard themselves as citizens of one nation is at hand.
Nelson Mandela
