"Know when to fold 'em..."

You know the Kenny Rogers song, "The Gambler," it's all about risk taking and how you should "...know when to walk away and know when to run."

Knowing when to walk away, to avoid a disaster or a squabble, is an all-purpose skill, a disposition really, a frame of mind too easy to abandon....

Admonitions for patience and prudence -- among the better parts of valor -- are as old as the hills.

For example, Abe Lincoln's early political career gave him many chances to step back from a conflict that he might have won, perhaps easily, a conflict that offered him no lasting benefit even in victory, or gave promise of ill favor as a future consequence.

John Hay and John Nicolay, Lincoln's presidential secretaries and later his biographers, recorded an anecdote expressing Lincoln's lifelong preferred reaction to conflict and political horsetrading:

"No man (who is) resolved to make the most of himself can spare time for personal contention...(give up) larger things to which you can show no more than equal right...Better give your path to a dog than be bitten by him in contesting for the right. Even killing the dog would not cure the bite."

Of course, Lincoln was a steadfast advocate and practitioner of doing the right thing, in compelling circumstances, regardless of personal cost.

He also believed, as Hay and Nicolay recalled, that "habitual peaceableness involved no lack of dignity."

"Know when to fold 'em..."