Milan Kundera Quotes

Decisions that lawmakers made decades or even a century ago have essentially locked us into ways of doing things, as the cost of changing looms more heavily than the potential benefits of trying something different.

Default choices often remain unchanged for no reason other than being the default, either because of this lack of information or humans' status quo bias.

People are stubborn, and sometimes even if change is good, people will always oppose change.

Our most important decisions are made while we are thinking about something else.

Fundamentalism is a kind of decision not to change your mind about something...Many of us are fundamentalists...because it worked pretty well for us.

How many of us persist in a precipitate course which, but for a moment of heedlessness we might never have entered upon, simply because we hate to change our minds.

I think the greatest lesson I have just recently learned is how powerful the mind is, informing our decision making unknowingly.

All my important decisions are made for me by my subconscious. My frontal lobes are just kidding themselves that they decide anything at all. All they do is think up reasons for the decisions that are already made.

Probably 90 percent of our life decisions are powered by the twin engines of inertia and laziness.

It is always wiser, where there is a choice, to trust inertia. It is the greatest force in the world.

The mind does not easily unlearn what it has been long in learning.

I guess it's hard for people who are so used to things the way they are - even if they're bad - to change. 'Cause they kind of give up. And when they do, everybody kind of loses.

Firmness in decision is often merely a form of stupidity. It indicates an inability to think the same thing out twice.

I've had to make really big decisions, knowing the results were not always in my control. Through these moments, I've learned to be daring and take risks but understand that everything always happens for a reason.

What I can control and all I know as of today, I am signed up for one more year...I guess things could change, but with all the uncertainty in many aspects, I don't see (his decision not to sign an extension) changing before camp gets here, and when camp gets here I'm even more certain to play it out.

Making no decision is a decision. To do nothing. And doing nothing always brings you to nowhere.

A successful marriage is a decision. You decide whether it's going to work, and then you turn around and you've been married 45 years.

Life is more a matter of choosing than knowing. He could never know the eventual destination of his path, but he could always choose in which direction to take each step.

every individual can make a difference ... if we continue to leave decision making to the so-called decision makers, things will never change.

Maybe it was inertia -or worse, fear- that was keeping me in the same place.

Most of us are only willing to call 5% of our present information into question any one point.

Those who are truly decrepit, living corpses, so to speak, are the middle-aged, middle-class men and woman who are stuck in their comfortable grooves and imagine that the status quo will least forever or else are so frightened it won't, that they have retreated into their mental bomb shelters to wait it out.

...it is not possible to create the opposite of what one has always known, simply because the opposite is believed to be desired. Human beings need what they already know, even horrors.

There's one thing worse than change and that's the status quo.

We always want to do things the way we like, that's why we never change.