The truth is I have from the very beginning listened to my instincts. All of my best decisions in life have come because I was attuned to what really felt like the next right move for me.
When you know that somebody lost their loved one as a result of a decision that I made, that's a tough moment. If you're a faithful person you try to empathize with the suffering that that person is going through.
In this age, in this country, public sentiment is everything. With it, nothing can fail; against it, nothing can succeed. Whoever molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes, or pronounces judicial decisions.
Our characterization of collective folly is that sound judgment is not feasible when there is forced or false agreement in groups. We also show how group polarization sets the stage for risky and even dangerous decisions to be made. How we navigate between false agreement and polarization is the kind of mastery that collective wisdom represents.
From the beginning, I said that Israel, one, has a right to defend herself, but Israel ought to be cautious about how she defends herself. Israel's a democratically elected government. They make decisions on their own sovereignty. It's their decision-making that is what leads to the tactics they chose.
You’d get very rich if you thought of yourself as having a card with only twenty punches in a lifetime, and every financial decision used up one punch. You’d resist the temptation to dabble. You’d make more good decisions and you’d make more big decisions.
The administration took care of a source of instability in Iraq. Envision a world in which Saddam Hussein was rushing for a nuclear weapon to compete against Iran. My decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the correct decision in my judgment. We didn't find the weapons we thought we would find or the weapons everybody thought he had. But he was a significant source of instability.
The only thing that really matters is that there be an action of goodness, love and intelligence in living. Is goodness individual or collective, is love personal or impersonal, is intelligence yours, mine or somebody else? If it is yours or mine then it is not intelligence, or love, or goodness. If goodness is an affair of the individual or of the collective, according to one's particular preference or decision, then it is no longer goodness.
[When I ordered 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan] that was the first time in which I looked out at a crowd of West Point graduates and knew that some of those might not come back because of that decision.