Thomas Sowell Quotes

Between two evils, choose neither; between two goods, choose both.

Saying 'yes' to one thing means saying 'no' to another. That's why decisions can be hard sometimes.

What's called a difficult decision is a difficult decision because either way you go there are penalties.

Everybody trades off in some sense or another.

Choice is a form of compromise, no? So why choose if you can have both?

I will always need to compromise and make choices - you just have to work hard at making the right choice day by day.

In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of others.

Choosing one path means abandoning others - if you try to follow every possible path you will end up following none.

You cannot eat your cake and have it.

As an economist, I'm aware that life is full of trade offs.

But the path you end up on means that you have to close a lot of doors, too.

When you choose the lesser of two evils, always remember that it is still an evil.

To govern is always to choose among disadvantages.

When you're offered things, it makes it so much easier to be indecisive. And it's silly because you can pass on some really amazing things.

When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that is in itself a choice.

You make decisions and you're not going to please everybody all the time.

We all have choices we have to make, and with those choices come certain sacrifices.

There is no decision that we can make that doesn't come with some sort of balance or sacrifice.

Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get.

I think that quite often you can only find a choice between bad and worse. But I think it's worth making the effort, and I like to expose my characters to that sort of situation.

Starting off, all options are always open, but as soon as you choose something, you inevitably limit yourself. If you go for B, A is out.

Once you consent to some concession, you can never cancel it and put things back the way they are.

There are goods so opposed that we cannot seize both, but, by too much prudence, may pass between them at too great a distance to reach either.

Even as economic and political freedoms have advanced enormously and generated huge benefits for humanity, they've also created a great deal of anxiety because every time you have to make a choice, there's anxiety about making the wrong one.

You are going to make choices and decisions that sometimes aren't going to always work in your favor and they are going to upset some other people.