"I think that you make the best choice with the information that you have before you at that given time"
About this Quote
There is a quiet mercy in Eriq La Salle's line: it turns regret into something workable. As an actor best known for playing a doctor under relentless pressure on ER, La Salle understands the cultural appetite for perfect calls and clean outcomes. This sentence pushes back on that fantasy. It insists that decision-making is always a snapshot, not a verdict handed down by an omniscient narrator.
The wording does the heavy lifting. "I think" lowers the temperature, offering humility rather than manifesto. "Best choice" is careful, too: not the right choice, not the heroic choice, just the best available inside a messy set of constraints. Then he nails the key limitation: "the information that you have before you at that given time". It's almost bureaucratic in its precision, and that's the point. The phrase builds a boundary around judgment. You can't fairly prosecute a past self with evidence your past self didn't possess.
The subtext is an antidote to modern hindsight culture, where every mistake gets retroactively edited into moral failure. It's also a quiet critique of perfectionism: if you demand certainty before acting, you never act. La Salle's intent feels less like self-exoneration and more like a practical ethic for living under incomplete data: own the choice, accept the limits, update when you learn more. It doesn't absolve responsibility; it relocates it from outcome-worship to process.
The wording does the heavy lifting. "I think" lowers the temperature, offering humility rather than manifesto. "Best choice" is careful, too: not the right choice, not the heroic choice, just the best available inside a messy set of constraints. Then he nails the key limitation: "the information that you have before you at that given time". It's almost bureaucratic in its precision, and that's the point. The phrase builds a boundary around judgment. You can't fairly prosecute a past self with evidence your past self didn't possess.
The subtext is an antidote to modern hindsight culture, where every mistake gets retroactively edited into moral failure. It's also a quiet critique of perfectionism: if you demand certainty before acting, you never act. La Salle's intent feels less like self-exoneration and more like a practical ethic for living under incomplete data: own the choice, accept the limits, update when you learn more. It doesn't absolve responsibility; it relocates it from outcome-worship to process.
Quote Details
| Topic | Decision-Making |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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