Thomas Schelling Quotes

If you know you don't have a win, then there's no use for you being in the game.

Don't fight a battle if you don't gain anything by winning.

There isn't a fight that I'm in that I'm not asking the question, 'What could we have done to avoid this?' Or, 'What can we do to avoid this in the future in terms of the kinds of things that we see?'

I think almost all strategic problems could at least be improved upon if people would do more careful game-theoretic analysis. The reason game theory works in predicting is because people intuit how to behave game-theoretically.

You want to win the wars you fight. That’s why you have to pick your wars carefully.

Analysis of opponents is something I like doing.

I thought poker might be a perfect environment to start to learn probabilistic decision-making, and to live what it means to have skill versus chance and to see how that played out. I would dive in head first into the poker world.

At gambling, the deadly sin is to mistake bad play for bad luck.

Game theory, however, deals only with the way in which ultrasmart, all knowing people should behave in competitive situations, and has little to say to Mr. X as he confronts the morass of his problem.

Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors. Behind one door is a car, the others, goats. You pick a door, say #1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say #3, which has a goat. He says to you: 'Do you want to pick door #2?' Is it to your advantage to switch your choice of doors?

Sometimes you have to lose a piece to win a game.

Life is very much about making the best decisions you can. So I think chess is very valuable.

A lot of what a military officer does is not just leading troops in combat. It's also doing budgets. It's solving complex problems. If you can sit down with warlords, you can certainly sit down with different parties and folks with different interests and come out with an amenable solution.

There's so much more involved with the game than just sitting there, looking at the numbers and saying, 'OK, these are my percentages, then I'm going to do it this way,' because that one time it doesn't work could cost your team a football game, and that's the thing a head coach has to live with, not the professor.

The bad player is the one who tries to calculate and play with the odds, as if his game, his life, were one of a large number of games. To do so is at best to succumb to another necessity, the necessity of large numbers. The good player does not fool himself, and accepts that there is exactly one chance, which produces by chance the necessity and even the purpose that he experiences.

Commerce is a game of skill which everyone cannot play and few can play well.

Do your worrying before you place your bet, not after the wheel stops turning.

We've all got to remember to pick our battles carefully, to be prepared to lose small ones, and to hold out for big ones.

It's got to be the best intellectual exercise out there. You're seeing through new situations every ten minutes. In the stock market you don't base your decisions on what the market is doing, but on what you think is rational. Bridge is about weighing gain/loss ratios. You're doing calculations all the time.

You have a certain set of facts and you are looking for situations where you have an edge, whether the edge is psychological or statistical.

The two most fundamental strategic choices are deciding where to play and how to win.

I've always been kind of a strategic thinking person - I love sports for instance, but my interest in sports is 'cause I love watching strategy in action or playing it. I'm not into the drama so much, of the physical action. I'm interested in the coach and how he's strategizing.

Football is like chess, only without the dice.

To venture an opinion is like moving a piece at chess: it may be taken, but it forms the beginning of a game that is won.

Strong leadership demands more than the willingness to use force. It means directing the use of the right tools at the right time for the right purpose and the right cause.