Counterfactual Thinking Quotes

You cannot see the past that did not happen any more than you can foresee the future.

As one looks back over history it is interesting to speculate on what would have happened if individuals or nations had acted differently in certain crises. I often wonder if these speculations will serve to give any of us more courage in facing new situations!

I have a dream of what would have happened if what happened instead hadn't.

I still think in a parallel universe, I became a mathematician.

I grew up during a time of peace, and my friends weren't joining the military - it wasn't something on my radar. But if you asked me whether I could go back and do it all over again now, and it meant I wouldn't go into filmmaking, there's a part of me that would have loved to try to be a Navy SEAL.

There's no use in asking what if. No one could ever give you the answers. I try, I really do, but it's hard for me to accept this way of thinking. I'm always wondering about the what-ifs, about the road not taken.

The less you think counterfactually, the less you experience stress. Stress, in this light, isn't a bad thing. It's simply a warning system telling you that your mind has lost touch with what's real.

History does not disclose to us its alternatives.

Frankly, I would not have made any difference in Vietnam, but much more is what difference it would have made in me.

By the way, did you ever realize that if Moses would have turned right instead of left, we'd have had the oil, the Arabs would have had the sand?

Look closer at the stress in your own life and you can identify that negative emotions are always built on counterfactual statements.

More than once I was tormented by the thought that if Providence had put me in the place of the incapable of criminal incompetents or scoundrels in our propaganda service, our battle with Destiny would have taken a different turn.

I don't know what would have happened to me as a writer if I had gone to England and shaped my life out of England. Of course, I will never know, but I think I prefer what did happen.

[People] don't judge you on what would have happened in the absence of a decision.

If I had gone ahead and died ten years ago, I'd probably be a cult figure today.

What fascinates me are the turning points where history could have been different.

I could have played water polo in high school instead of football. I would have gone to Stanford like my other buddies from Irvine who played water polo and ended up going to Stanford, you know.

If one could have a wish, or an alternative life, I would've liked to have been John Lennon.

The less you think counterfactually, the less you experience stress. Stress, in this light, isn't a bad thing. It's simply a warning system telling you that your mind has lost touch with what's real.

I never ponder counterfactuals.

it is a lean employment of time to brood on what might have happened along some other turning.

The man who cannot occasionally imagine events and conditions of existence that are contrary to the causal principle as he knows it will never enrich his science by the addition of a new idea.

We often regret we did not do otherwise, when that very otherwise would, in all probability, have done for us.