Richard Thaler Quotes

What motivates most people to change their behavior is consequences. No consequences? No behavior modification.

We benefit, intellectually and personally, from the interplay between different selves, from the balance between long-term contemplation and short-term impulse. We should be wary about tipping the scales too far. The community of selves shouldn't be a democracy, but it shouldn't be a dictatorship, either.

Movies don't make people act a fool. People act a fool because they want to act a fool.

I feel I should be doing stupid stuff, but I'm not going to.

Positive defaults protect you from yourself - and that helps you to make decisions in the moment that are better for your long-term interests.

When you try to bring about behavioral change by an effort of will, you actually do violence to yourself, and the chances are very good that you will not succeed. This is so universally true that you can actually make money from it.

The art of living consists in knowing which impulses to obey and which must be made to obey.

Positive defaults align our short-term decisions with our long-term interests. And we don't always do that.

I need to protect myself from my own addictive impulse.

If we become aware of what's happening before we act, behaviour becomes a function of choice rather than a result of an impulse or trigger. You begin to control your world more as opposed to the outside world controlling you.

There are two areas where you can't stop people misbehaving: eating and sex

The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs.

The ability to subordinate an impulse to a value is the essence of the proactive person.

The intelligent desire self-control; children want candy.

Older people do a better job of managing their impulses, and so they're better able to put off putting off.

It may be said that the basic characteristic of human behavior in general is that humans personally influence their relations with the environment and through that environment personally change their behavior, subjugating it to their control.

If you did everything your mind told you to do, you do some really strange stuff. You'll probably be in jail, you'll be in trouble. But, it's all about control. We all have to control our feelings. That's the thing that separates us from animals.

There is perhaps no psychological skill more fundamental than resisting impulse.

The life of children, as much as that of intemperate men, is wholly governed by their desires.

I'm really not good with impulse control.

While our pulse beats and we feel emotion, let us put off the business. Things will truly seem different to us when we have quieted and cooled down. It is passion that is in command at first, it is passion that speaks, it is not we ourselves.

Life's full of opportunities to make crappy decisions that feel good. And after the first one, the rest get a whole lot easier.

Many a bad habit is developed through overindulgence, and many a good one by chastisement; therefore, beat your son as well as your pupil; never indulge them.

It is a youthful failing to be unable to control one's impulses.

Once you understand the power of stimulus control, you can use it to your advantage by changing the stimuli in your environment and avoiding undesirable ones; or, if that's not possible, by filling your consciousness with thoughts about their less tempting aspects.