Quotes by Barry Schwartz

“On Yom Kippur, we gather as individuals, as part of a community and as part of a country, ... For most of us, today is the only day during the year that we go without food.”

“Yom Kippur is about personal and community transgressions. The fasting remains a compelling element. The purpose of the ritual observance is to change our ethical observance,”

“Our institutions and values are in jeopardy as the mores of the market pervade all social life in this country. Loyalty, honesty, courage, discipline, patriotism, and commitment to family are being crowded out by the goals and rules of economic rationality -- do whatever makes the most money.”

“The sky is the limit on what the complications can cost.”

“This is just not a world for amateurs. The stakes are higher for things like health care and retirement plans than jeans or cereal.”

“The assumption is that if choice is good, more choice is better. Thats not necessarily true.”

“The unbelievable catastrophe that is (the Medicare situation) is a prime example of ideology dominating sense. Here the unquestioned assumption that youre making people better off if you give them more choices is just plain wrong. Some people who cant process the intricacies of Medicare are making the choice not to participate at all.”

“The most important thing is to learn that good enough is almost always good enough; you dont need to find the best. Youll be happier if, once you find something that meets your standards, you stop looking and dont worry about it.”

“It is a daunting challenge if you have 100 funds to choose from. People are terrified that they will make a mistake. They say that they will figure it out tomorrow. But tomorrow will be no different than today.”

“Theres an ice cream place in Vancouver that has 200 flavors, if you can believe that. But the people who go there end up less satisfied with their purchase than the people who buy their ice cream at a place with only 20 flavors. Yet people are lined up out the door at the place with 200 flavors because it seems like youre more likely to get exactly what you want.”

Practical wisdom, Aristotle told us, is the combination of moral will and moral skill.

The secret to happiness is low expectations.

on idea technology--Science creates ideas, science creates ways of understanding. And in the social sciences, ways of understanding ourselves. And they have an enormous influence on how we think, what we aspire to, and how we act. ......idea technology may be the most profoundly important technology that science gives us.......we do have to worry about the theories we have of human nature, because human nature will be changed by the theories we have that are designed to explain and help us understand human beings....it is only human nature to have a human nature that is very much the product of the society in which people live.--TED The way we think about work is broken

The mistake is to assume that the way it feels at the moment is the way it will feel forever.

Much of human progress has involved reducing the time and energy, as well as the number of processes we have to engage in and think about, for each of us to obtain the necessities of life.

The lesson here is that high expectations can be counter-productive. We probably can do more to affect the quality of our lives by controlling our expectations than we can by doing virtually anything else. The blessing of modest expectations is that they leave room for many experiences to be a pleasant surprise, a hedonic plus. The challenge is to find a way to keep expectations modest, even as actual experiences keep getting better.

If you shatter the fish bowl so that everything is possible you dont have freedom you have paralysis. Everybody needs a fishbowl.

“The secret to happiness is low expectations.”