Human Decisions Quotes

Poverty is not the simple result of bad geography, bad culture, bad history. It's the result of us: of the ways that people choose to organize their societies.

The sole ultimate factor in human decisions is physical force. This we must learn, however repugnant the idea may seem, if we are to protect ourselves and our institutions. Reliance on anything else is fallacious and ruinous.

The problems we face, did not come down from the heavens. They are made, they are made by bad human decisions, and good human decisions can change them.

In retrospect, the Millennium marked only a moment in time. It was the events of September 11 that marked a turning point in history, where we confront the dangers of the future and assess the choices facing humankind.

Our failure was that our intelligence community thought [Saddam Hussein ] had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction. That was a mistake. There is fallibility in human intelligence and in human decisions.

But don't you see, all human decisions are made like this. Do you think the mother knows what will happen to the child in her womb? Dear God, we are lost, I tell you. What does it matter if you give it to me and it's wrong! There is no wrong! There is only desperation, and I would have it! I want to live forever with you.

We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.

There's a lot of randomness in the decisions that people make.

History isn't something you look back at and say it was inevitable, it happens because people make decisions that are sometimes very impulsive and of the moment, but those moments are cumulative realities.

Pictures of entire lives, of the choices that people make and how those choices work out for them, those pictures are almost impossible to get.

We should have equivalent due-process protections for algorithmic decisions as for human decisions.

I'm really interested in people's decisions.

We all are just people, and something happens, and we make a decision as a result when something happens, and it could be a poor choice or a good choice or anywhere in between. But we make that decision in the moment, and we live with the consequences.

I think that there is something beautiful about mortality. It makes our decisions mean more.