Difficult Choices Quotes

Tough times call for tougher decisions.

In life, everybody faces choices between doing what's popular, easy, and wrong vs. doing what's lonely, difficult, and right. These decisions intensify when you run a company, because the consequences get magnified 1,000 fold. As in life, the excuses for CEOs making the wrong choice are always plentiful.

Deal with the Devil if the Devil has a constituency - and don't complain about the heat.

My relationship with my first child was nonexistent. I was broke and I was a new rapper whose career was spiraling downward.

Being away from my family for six months a year - even if it was in the beautiful surroundings of Guadeloupe in the Caribbean - was just too hard.

The issues that cross a president's desk are never easy. The easy questions don't even get to the president.

When I came into office, I could have kicked the can down the road for a little while, or I could do the right thing.

I am approached with the most opposite opinions and advice .... These are not, however, the days of miracles, and I supposed it will be granted that I am not to expect a direct revelation. I must study the plain physical facts of the case, ascertain what is possible and learn what appears to be wise and right. The subject is difficult, and good men do not agree.

Politics is a field where the choice lies constantly between two blunders.

In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.

War is never a choice between a good choice and a bad choice. It is a choice between a bad choice and a worse choice.

I had fallen in love with Cherry as a junior in high school. When I discovered she was going to go to Auburn, I was vacillating between Alabama and Kentucky because of Babe. I eliminated Kentucky because I wanted to be as close to Auburn as I could, and Tuscaloosa is a lot closer than Lexington is.

Fiction should be about moral dilemmas that are so bloody difficult that the author doesn't know the answer.

CEOs make hard decisions; sometimes, the least worst is the right one.

I actually don't hope for a legacy. I think that it impedes your ability to make the hard decisions if you sit around saying, 'How will this affect my legacy?'

It's not easy to do the unpopular thing.

While Safeco's turnaround is one of the greatest things I have ever participated in, the heart-wrenching decisions to let people go will stay with me forever.

Sometimes it seems like this is the choice - either kick ass or kiss ass.

It's impossible to please everybody all of the time, but you just have to believe that you're making decisions for the right reasons.

Trade-offs have been with us ever since the late unpleasantness in the Garden of Eden.

People can do bad things for good reasons, or for what they think are good reasons.

I didn't have my mom or my dad or cousins or anybody to guide me. I was around a whole bunch of wolves... I was just like, 'Lord, just guide me and weed these snakes out of my life.'

I've been on the other end of sticky decisions, have been the 'B' side, but I never go in there thinking, 'Is this going to go against me?'

Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights.

Suze, your whole life," my dad went on, not without sympathy, "you've always made the right decisions. Not necessarily the easiest ones. The right ones. Don't mess that up now, when you're facing what's probably the most important decision you'll ever have to make.