Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Quotes

Statistics are no substitute for judgment.

Making decisions quickly isn't for everyone, and I've had my disasters, but overall, it works for me.

A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers.

Half our mistakes in life arise from feeling where we ought to think, and thinking where we ought to feel.

Everyone complains of his memory, but no one complains of his judgment.

I have to take decisions—not back hunches.

Any 6 year old’s hindsight is better than a President’s foresight.

In many important contexts, especially those that are complex, new, or unfamiliar, you shouldn’t blink… and you really shouldn’t trust your gut.

Gut feeling is all about the experiences that you have had in your life. It is about being in difficult scenarios, knowing what worked, what did not work, and then taking a decision.

There's a voice inside children that knows right from wrong. I call it listening to your inner Jiminy Cricket. I tell my daughter, 'If you're thinking this is not the best idea, it probably isn't.'

Without our emotions, we can't make smart decisions.

When it comes to making decisions, I'm not what you'd call a numbers guy.

You try to make the decisions that you think are best in realtime.

People who are great at making decisions in the face of uncertainty have great judgment.

The purpose of education...is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions.

Intuition is the discriminative faculty that enables you to decide which of two lines of reasoning is right. Perfect intuition makes you a master of all.

Truly successful decision-making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking.

In life everyone has a choice. The key is: make a right choice.

We must rely less on spreadsheets and funding formulas and more on common sense.

It amazes me how people are often more willing to act based on little or no data than to use data that is a challenge to assemble.

Making good judgments when one has complete data, facts, and knowledge is not leadership - it's bookkeeping

Wisdom is exercised in the choices you make.

The wise form right judgment of the present from what is past.

Usually, I'm pretty good about sorting through the options and then making decisions that I'm confident are the best decisions in that moment, given the information we have. But there are times where I think I wish I could have imagined a different level of insight.

We don't want anybody to come off half-cocked and make a decision about what we're only in the middle of doing, right? So if there's shots of me out there, then somebody's going to say, "Oh, that's not the right way. That's not this and that." It has to be seen in context.