“That's the thing about human life--there is no control group, no way to ever know how any of us would have turned out if any variables had been changed.”

— Daniel Keyes , book Flowers for Algernon

Source: Flowers for Algernon

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "That's the thing about human life--there is no control group, no way to ever know how any of us would have turned out i…" by Daniel Keyes?

Daniel Keyes photo

Daniel Keyes 47

American author 1927–2014

Related quotes

“That’s the thing about a human life-there’s no control group, no way to ever know how any of us would have turned out if any variables had been changed.”

Elizabeth Gilbert (1969) American writer

Source: Eat, pray, love: one woman's search for everything

“We are more connected in more ways to more people than we ever have been at any point in human history. This is changing everything, and it would be deeply strange if it didn’t change money too.”

John Lanchester (1962) British writer

When Bitcoin Grows Up https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v38/n08/john-lanchester/when-bitcoin-grows-up (April 21, 2016), The London Review of Books

“What would have happened if she had not lost that necklace? Who knows? who knows? How strange and changeful is life! How small a thing is needed to make or ruin us!”

Guy De Maupassant (1850–1893) French writer

Variant translation:
What would have happened if she had not lost that necklace? Who knows? Who knows? How singular life is, how changeable! What a little thing it takes to save you or to lose you.
La Parure (The Necklace) (1884)

“They are all one, the mothers of us all, like the money you spent. Imagine the vanish of weight if the advice of your mother never existed. They tell us things, unless we have no mothers and either way things turn out such that nothing you've ever heard is ever any help.”

Daniel Handler book Adverbs

Adverbs (2006), Not Particularly

“The only thing that made me, or any of us, special was that no one in the whole of history would ever see the universe exactly the same way any other of us saw it.”

Grant Morrison (1960) writer

Source: Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human

“All any of us wanted, really, was to know that we counted. That someone else's life would not have been as rich without us here.”

Jodi Picoult book Handle With Care

Source: Handle with Care

“Simple answers to life’s questioning. That would be a magic beyond any I have ever been seeing.”

Tad Williams (1957) novelist

Source: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, Stone of Farewell (1990), Chapter 8, “On Sikkihoq’s Back” (p. 188).

“We never had any use for Taylor or any of the efficiency or scientific management crowd. They never realized that human toil was the last thing in the world you had to be efficient about; the only way to be really efficient is to eliminate it entirely, and this would have been heresy to any of the Taylor, Gant, Barth, Cook efficiency crowd.
It is sad to contemplate that men of the technical ability of the names mentioned in this paragraph were so lame in their thinking and social outlook that they missed the boat so completely. Who in hell wants to be efficient with a shovel, and what sense would there be even if you succeeded? They should have had their heads opened with a shovel; it might have been more effective.”

Howard Scott (1890–1970) American engineer

Source: History and Purpose of Technocracy, 1965, p. 7-8

“It turned out I had always been a smoker. I just hadn't had any cigarettes.”

Augusten Burroughs book Running with Scissors

Source: Running with Scissors

“Daddy says that, in a dilemma, it is helpful to change any variable, then reexamine the problem.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Have Space Suit—Will Travel

Source: Have Space Suit—Will Travel (1958), Chapter 5

Related topics