Time & Perspective Quote by William Glasser

Glasser’s line doesn’t flatter you; it corners you. “Good or bad” is the bait-and-switch: he grants moral ambiguity, then quietly removes the alibi of “I had no choice.” In the logic of Reality Therapy and choice theory, behavior isn’t a mysterious eruption of impulse or fate. It’s an attempt to meet needs with the tools, perceptions, and options we believe we have. “Best choice” sounds generous, but it’s also diagnostic: if your best choice was destructive, the problem isn’t that you lacked goodness, it’s that your menu of choices was impoverished or distorted in that moment.

The subtext is radically anti-excuse, yet not necessarily punitive. Glasser is smuggling in agency as a therapeutic lever. If what you did was your best choice, you can’t outsource responsibility to your past, your partner, your wiring. But you also don’t have to drown in shame. You acted to solve something - numb pain, win approval, avoid conflict, seize control - and your solution was the best you could imagine right then. That reframes regret: not as proof of inherent failure, but as evidence that your “right then” needed better skills, better supports, better self-awareness.

Context matters: Glasser wrote against a mid-century psychiatric culture that could lean heavily on diagnosis, determinism, and passive patienthood. This sentence is a manifesto for a different kind of psychology: one that treats people less like bundles of symptoms and more like decision-makers who can expand their choices. It’s empowering, and a little unforgiving - by design.