I’d realized that the essential thing was to give condemned man a chance. Even one in a thousand was quite enough to sort things out. For instance, I imagined they could find some chemical compound for the patient to take (I thought of him as the patient) which would kill him nine times out of ten. He would know this, that was the condition. Because when I really thought about it and considered things calmly, I could see what was wrong with the guillotine was that you had no chance at all, absolutely none.
From Albert Camus’s The Outsider
Beyond Six Rivers 