Paradox of Choice Quotes

If everything is very important, then nothing is important.

People were actually 6 times more likely to buy a jar of jam if they had encountered 6 than if they encountered 24, so what we learned from this study was that while people were more attracted to having more options, that's what sort of got them in the door or got them to think about jam, when it came to choosing time they were actually less likely to make a choice if they had more to choose from than if they had fewer to choose from.

We are a society dying, said Aunt Lydia, of too much choice.

It doesn't make sense to have to do the wrong thing in order to do the right thing.

People of the future may suffer not from an absence of choice but from a paralysing surfeit of it. They may turn out to be victims of that peculiarly super-industrial dilemma: overchoice.

Human beings are the only creatures who are able to behave irrationally in the name of reason.

In fact, even in that store Draeger's they had 348 different kinds of jam actually in the jam aisle. And what we found over about, say, 10 years of research is that as the number of choices actually increase people are less likely to make a choice and sometimes they do this even when it's really bad for them.

They're mutually incompatible I feel; being a wise thief and a wise father.

Well, my definition of a tragedy is a clash between right and right.

That's the number one thing I hear about humans. You have all these choices, so you're confused all the time, and you think so much that you're never happy.

They seemed to be able to choose. We seemed to be able to choose, then. We were a society dying of too much choice.

It's not the bad ideas that do you in, but the good ones.

The trouble begins with a design philosophy that equates 'more options' with 'greater freedom.'

...Choice in every form is conflict. Contradiction is inevitable in choice; this contradiction, inner and outer breeds confusion and misery.

When my boys were little, I'd throw so many toys at them, but they didn't want to play with any. Then I'd give them a truck, and they would play for hours. I believe the same thing applies to a consumer - edit their choices, and they will be more intrigued.

It's the dualistic ways of looking at things that produces the evil.

I am so, so lucky. I am the luckiest girl in the world, really. And still with access to everything I could possibly want I still say 'Oh dear, what am I going to wear today?' There's no ending to that question!

I think we do good things and bad things, sometimes simultaneously - or they may be the same thing.

We do things for good reasons that are bad.

Average Americans order nonfat decaf iced vanilla lattes at Starbucks and choose from 1,500 drawer pulls at The Great Indoors. Amazon gives every town a bookstore with 2 million titles, while Netflix promises 35,000 different movies on DVD. Choice is everywhere - liberating to some, but to others, a new source of stress.

When two people compliment each other with the choice of anything, each of them generally gets that which he likes least.

What leads us astray is confusing more choices with more control. Because it is not clear that the more choices you have the more in control you feel. We have more choices than we've ever had before.

This is at a time when you know most of us drank tap water, so I used to go to this store and examine all the varieties and we used to marvel at all the choices out there, but I found that I rarely bought anything and I kind of thought that was kind of curious. I mean, they had things that the other grocery stores didn't have and yet I never bought anything.

I mean we know that some choice makes you better off than no choice. Now do we get better off if we go from a lot of choice versus a few choices? And there I think the answer is much, much, much more complicated.

I wish I had coined the phrase 'tyranny of choice,' but someone beat me to it. The counterintuitive truth is that have an abundance of options does not make you feel privileged and indulged; too many options make you feel like all of them are wrong, and that you are wrong if you choose any of them.