Amory Houghton Quotes

I have to take decisions—not back hunches.

There is not only a right thing to do. There is a right time to do it.

Enthusiasm for a cause sometimes warps judgment.

Life is made up of a series of judgments on insufficient data, and if we waited to run down all our doubts, it would flow past us.

What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made. Now it is paying the consequences of making those decisions in secret, but far more telling to me is America is paying the consequences.

Competing pressures tempt one to believe that an issue deferred is a problem avoided. More often it is a crisis invited.

We must not say every mistake is a foolish one.

If you get all the facts, your judgment can be right. If you don't get all the facts, it can't be right.

Between too early and too late, there is never more than a moment.

The most difficult quality is to make the right decision. Because you can be quick, you can be strong, you can jump incredibly, you can have the best shots and you can be able to score goals from 50 yards, but if you don't know when to shoot, when to run or when to jump, you're lost.

The timing of your decision is just as important as the decision you make.

We have to make the right decisions.

Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.

Here's the teaching point, if you're teaching kids about intelligence and policy: Intelligence does not absolve policymakers of responsibility to ask tough questions, and it doesn't absolve them of having curiosity about the consequences of their actions.

I think that you make the best choice with the information that you have before you at that given time.

To govern is always to choose among disadvantages.

There's no wrong time to make the right decision.

A government must not waiver once it has chosen its course. It must not look to the left or right but go forward.

Every decision you make in life, not just on the sporting field - a lot of time and energy goes into it. You think things through before you make decisions and you always think the decision you make at the time is going to be the right one.

In crises the most daring course is often safest.

People (political and military leaders) much prefer to speak of what they are going to do rather than what the outcome will be.

Sometimes ruin comes for lack of judgment.

It is circumstance and proper timing that give an action its character and make it either good or bad.

A President in a ... crisis makes, say, 10 bets a day. Maybe I made the wrong choice three times.

It's not the quantity of your decisions; it's the quality.