Quotes about indecision

A collection of quotes on the topic of indecision, time, timing, making.

Best quotes about indecision

Jimmy Buffett photo

“Indecision may or may not be my problem.”

Jimmy Buffett (1946) American singer–songwriter and businessman
Brandon Boyd photo

“Forgive my indecision. I am only a man.”

Brandon Boyd (1976) American rock singer, writer and visual artist

Lyrics, Morning View (2001)

Oscar Levant photo

“Once he makes up his mind, he's full of indecision.”

Oscar Levant (1906–1972) American comedian, composer, pianist and actor

On President Dwight D. Eisenhower, as quoted in The Nastiest Things Ever Said about Republicans (2006) by Martin Higgins, p. 83.

“Patience is decisive indecision.”

James Richardson (1950) American poet

#451
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

Quotes about indecision

Allen Ginsberg photo

“I don't do anything with my life except romanticize and decay with indecision.”

Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) American poet

Source: The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice: First Journals and Poems 1937-1952

Bertrand Russell photo

“Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile.”

Source: The Conquest of Happiness

Bertrand Russell photo
Bertrand Russell photo

“One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Part I: Man and Nature, Ch. 1: Current Perplexities, pp. 4–5
1950s, New Hopes for a Changing World (1951)
Context: Consider MacArthur and his Republican supporters. So limited is his intelligence and his imagination that he is never puzzled for one moment. All we have to do is to go back to the days of the Opium War. After we have killed a sufficient number of millions of Chinese, the survivors among them will perceive our moral superiority and hail MacArthur as a saviour. But let us not be one-sided. Stalin, I should say, is equally simple- minded and equally out of date. He, too, believes that if his armies could occupy Britain and reduce us all to the economic level of Soviet peasants and the political level of convicts, we should hail him as a great deliverer and bless the day when we were freed from the shackles of democracy. One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.

José Saramago photo

“Authoritarian, paralyzing, circular, occasionally elliptical, stock phrases, also jocularly referred to as nuggets of wisdom, are malignant plague, one of the very worst ever to ravage the earth. We say to the confused, Know thyself, as if knowing yourself was not the fifth and most difficult of human arithmetical operations, we say to the apathetic, Where there’s a will, there’s a way, as if the brute realities of the world did not amuse themselves each day by turning that phrase on its head, we say to the indecisive, Begin at the beginning, as if that beginning were the clearly visible point of a loosely wound thread and that all we had to do was to keep pulling until we reached the other end, and as if, between the former and the latter, we had held in our hands a smooth, continuous thread with no knots to untie, no snarled to untangle, a complete impossibility in the life of a skien, or indeed, if we may be permitted on more stock phrase, in the skien of life. … These are the delusions of the pure and unprepared, the beginning is never the clear, precise end of a thread, the beginning is a long, painfully slow process that requires time and patience in order to find out in which direction it is heading, a process that feels its way along the path ahead like a blind man the beginning is just the beginning, what came before is nigh on worthless.”

Source: The Cave (2000), p. 54 (Vintage 2003)

Jonathan Stroud photo
Anne Rice photo

“What is fear after all? It is indecision. You seek some way to resist, escape. There is none.”

Anne Rice (1941) American writer

Source: The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty

Kamila Shamsie photo
Maya Angelou photo
T.S. Eliot photo

“Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.”

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)
Context: There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands,
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

E.E. Cummings photo
Darren Shan photo
Elizabeth Gilbert photo
Vātsyāyana photo
Lyndall Urwick photo
Antonin Scalia photo

“The outcome of today's case will doubtless be heralded as a triumph of judicial statesmanship. It is not that, unless it is statesmanlike needlessly to prolong this Court's self-awarded sovereignty over a field where it has little proper business, since the answers to most of the cruel questions posed are political, and not juridical -- a sovereignty which therefore quite properly, but to the great damage of the Court, makes it the object of the sort of organized public pressure that political institutions in a democracy ought to receive. […] Ordinarily, speaking no more broadly than is absolutely required avoids throwing settled law into confusion; doing so today preserves a chaos that is evident to anyone who can read and count. Alone sufficient to justify a broad holding is the fact that our retaining control, through Roe, of what I believe to be, and many of our citizens recognize to be, a political issue, continuously distorts the public perception of the role of this Court. We can now look forward to at least another Term with carts full of mail from the public, and streets full of demonstrators, urging us -- their unelected and life-tenured judges who have been awarded those extraordinary, undemocratic characteristics precisely in order that we might follow the law despite the popular will -- to follow the popular will. Indeed, I expect we can look forward to even more of that than before, given our indecisive decision today. […] It was an arguable question today whether [Section] 188.029 of the Missouri law contravened this Court’s understanding of Roe v. Wade, and I would have examined Roe rather than examining the contravention. […] Of the four courses we might have chosen today -- to reaffirm Roe, to overrule it explicitly, to overrule it sub silentio, or to avoid the question -- the last is the least responsible. On the question of the constitutionality of [Section] 188.029, I concur in the judgment of the Court and strongly dissent from the manner in which it has been reached.”

Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989, concurring in part and concurring in the judgment), 492 U.S. 490 https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/492/490#writing-USSC_CR_0492_0490_ZC1, No. 88-605 ; decided July 3, 1989
1980s

Dylan Moran photo
Cyril Connolly photo
Alastair Reynolds photo
Alicia Silverstone photo
Chaim Soutine photo
Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston photo
Timothy Ferriss photo
Amir Taheri photo
Isaac Asimov photo

“To him, a stilted geometric love of arrangement was “system,” an indefatigable and feverish interest in the pettiest facets of day-to-day bureaucracy was “industry,” indecision when right was “caution,” and blind stubbornness when wrong, “determination.””

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

Source: The Foundation series (1951–1993), Foundation and Empire (1952), Chapter 12 “Captain and Mayor”

Henry Taylor photo
Calvin Coolidge photo
William James photo

“There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

Source: 1890s, The Principles of Psychology (1890), Ch. 4

Stephen Harper photo
Jacques Derrida photo
Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey photo

“Grey was an ambitious man who always wished to lead, but his overt ambition during his youth made him unpopular. He lacked the warmth of personality that made Fox revered by his followers. Grey was respected but rarely loved. His achievements were few, but they were significant. He helped to keep liberal principles alive during the years of conflict with revolutionary France, and in 1832 he safeguarded the continuity of the British constitution into an era of increasingly rapid social and political change. In character he was a man of contradictions, headstrong but easily discouraged by failure, imperious but indecisive, cautious and introspective. He was at his best when in office, for he sought fame and reputation: in opposition he often became despondent. He was a man of principle and integrity, though not always successful in execution. His bearing and attitudes were aristocratic, and his instincts were fundamentally conservative. He was a whig of the eighteenth-century school, most at home among his deferential clients, tenants, and labourers at Howick, and he never came to terms with the new industrial society which was coming into being during his later years. It is greatly to his credit that his Reform Act, whatever its conservative purpose, smoothed the path for that new society to establish its dominance without destroying the old.”

Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey (1764–1845) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

E. A. Smith, ‘ Grey, Charles, second Earl Grey (1764–1845) http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/11526’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2009, accessed 8 Sept 2012.
About

Marianne von Werefkin photo
Mickey Spillane photo

“No good neurotic finds it difficult to be both opinionated and indecisive.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Neurotics and neurosis

Guy Debord photo
Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey photo
H. G. Wells photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo

“We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence (1967)
Context: We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

Anatole France photo
P. V. Narasimha Rao photo
Johann Gottlieb Fichte photo
Steven Crowder photo
T.S. Eliot photo
Napoleon Hill photo
Steven Crowder photo

“You can be a namby-pamby leftie, a gun-toting neo-con or a soft, indecisive moderate. I really don’t care. Just don’t lie to me.
As an aside, I’ve never once claimed to be “offended.””

Steven Crowder (1987) American actor

Then again, I’m a grown man.
Like all great character assassination attempts, implication is much more effective than accusation.
Listen, I’m not somebody who really cares about polarization, political correctness or even what context can be fit into proper 40-character formatting. People can hold any opinion that they want on any subject that they choose. Just don’t proactively lie to people. It’s a simple request really, and one that we don’t hear nearly enough.
It’s for that same reason that I’d rather engage the president over his current policy failures than crazy conspiracy theories. By that same token, I would expect many of the HuffPo readers to hate me for plenty of things that I’ve actually said in the past as opposed to those made up by weak, lefty, online-commentating wieners.
Go ahead and take your foot off the “civility” gas pedal for all I care. We should all be replacing it with “honesty.”
Source: 13 February 2012 on Huffington Post https://www.huffpost.com/entry/cpac-2012-rap-video_b_1273779

Vera Stanley Alder photo

“The days that followed were a game I enjoyed playing. Fake indecision is delicious when people want you to do something.”

Roger Zelazny (1937–1995) American speculative fiction writer

This Mortal Mountain (p. 135)
Short fiction, The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth, and Other Stories (1971)