A Prompt and Decided "No"

“Through our weakened power or personal judgment we have vacillated for years on the knife-edge of indecision,” said Dr. Foster Kennedy⎯and a vacillating indecision is one of life’s most uncomfortable conditions.

It is true that there are uncertainties that make some decisions exceedingly difficult, but there are some kinds of decision, which, for peace and safety and self-respect, ought to be more or less automatic.

“It is a great evil, as well as a misfortune,” said Charles Simmons, “to be unable to utter a prompt and decided ‘No.'”

As another observer said: “One must separate from anything that forces one to repeat ‘No’ again and again.”

“Nothing can be more destructive to vigor of action, said John Foster, “than protracted, anxious fluctuation, through resolutions adopted, rejected, resumed, and suspended . . . A man without decision can never be said to belong to himself; he is a wave of the sea, or a feather in the air which every breeze blows about . . .

“The souls of men of undecided and feeble purpose are the graveyard of good intentions. It is a poor and disgraceful thing not to be able to reply, with some degree of certainty, to the simple questions, ‘What will you be? What will you do?'”⎯and what won’t you do?

“I hate to see things done by halves.⎯If it be right, do it boldly,⎯if it be wrong, leave it undone.”

“When a man has not a good reason for doing a thing,” said Thomas Scott, “he has one good reason for letting it alone.”

It comes down again to standards, convictions, character, courage, a reasonable amount of flexibility, a great degree of firmness; the strength to pursue a good purpose, or, if it is not good, the strength to say “no”⎯and mean it⎯and the judgment and character to leave it alone.