Amos Tversky

"The bystander effect shows us that we are not always the people we think we are."

"Sunk cost fallacy makes us throw good money after bad."

"We overestimate our uniqueness and underestimate our similarity."

"The planning fallacy makes us perpetually optimistic about timelines."

"We live in a world of uncertainty yet demand certainty from ourselves."

"Cognitive biases are not flaws; they are features of a system trying to make sense of complexity."

"The more rational we try to be, the more irrational we often become."

"What we measure changes what we see and how we act."

"Every question we ask contains embedded assumptions."

"We are all experts in our own experience and amateurs in everyone else's."

"The choices we make define us more than our circumstances ever can."

"Hope is not optimism; hope is the commitment to act despite uncertainty."

"The mind is a powerful instrument that can deceive us in magnificent ways."

"We are all prisoners of our own heuristics and biases."

"Intuition is recognition, but we don't always recognize what we think we recognize."

"The most important thing to understand about human decision-making is that we are not as rational as we believe."

"Loss aversion is a fundamental principle of human nature—we fear losing what we have more than gaining something new."

"Overconfidence is perhaps the most dangerous bias in human cognition."

"We live in the moment, but we make decisions as if we understand the future."

"The availability heuristic makes recent events loom larger in our minds than they deserve."

"Anchoring effects shape how we think about numbers and values in ways we cannot escape."

"Representativeness leads us to judge probability by similarity, often with disastrous results."

"The human brain is magnificent at pattern recognition, even when no pattern exists."

"We are creatures of narrative; we cannot help but tell stories about our lives."

"Happiness is not a state we reach, but a comparison we make."

"The reference point from which we measure success is almost entirely arbitrary."

"Memory is not a recording device; it is a storytelling device."

"We underestimate the power of adaptation—we adjust to almost everything."

"The experiencing self and the remembering self are often at odds with each other."

"Framing effects demonstrate that how a choice is presented matters as much as the choice itself."