Best 92 quotes in «hindsight quotes» category

Cliff Stearns talks about what he did to Planned Parenthood, making Solyndra a household name - why didn't he do this sooner? Why didn't he see it coming? It's the oversight committee, not the hindsight committee.

But history is a faithless teller whose cruel recourse to hindsight makes fools of its actors.

But then, I suppose, when with the benefit of hindsight one begins to search one's past for such 'turning points', one is apt to start seeing them everywhere.

hindsight is not a strategy.

Hindsight is common and bland as boiled potatoes.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

Hindsight, usually looked down upon, is probably as valuable as foresight, since it does include a few facts.

Hindsight is good, foresight is better; but second sight is best of all.

Hindsight plays tricks on our minds.

Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.

Hindsight is not only clearer than perception-in-the-moment but also unfair to those who actually lived through the moment.

Hindsight provides new eyes.

I always enjoyed movies and in hindsight I realise how captivating they were to me.

Hindsight is illuminating but not always what we want to see.

In hindsight everything is much clearer.

In hindsight, I realized I could see into the future. Which is kind of like having premonitions of flashbacks.

In hindsight it may even seem inevitable that a socialist society will starve when it runs out of capitalists.

If, in 2008, I could have not been in equities, I wouldn't have been in equities. If I could have not bet on the Seahawks in the Super Bowl, I wouldn't have bet on the Seahawks. Life and statesmanship are not lived with the benefit of hindsight.

The inevitable effect of a biographer's hindsight is to belittle the subject's foresight.

in the midst of war and crisis nothing is as clear or as certain as it appears in hindsight

I once called the head of a network a liar. In hindsight, I should have called him an incompetent liar.

I stay true to my lyrics. If I go back and look at them in hindsight, the emotions I had when I wrote them have passed. It feels unjustified to change them.

I went to high school in Lexington, Massachusetts, which in hindsight was very nice.

Mr. [Richard M.] Nixon never has anything but hindsight.

The wisdom of hindsight, so useful to historians and indeed to authors of memoirs, is sadly denied to practicing politicians.

The most fertile source of insight is hindsight.

Of all the forms of wisdom, hindsight is by general consent the least merciful, the most unforgiving.

When I was younger, I made some decisions that I shouldn't have. And, in hindsight, I've almost always been wrong when I haven't listened to myself.

Always plan no matter how improbable it seems. . The bill for hindsight is much more expensive than the reciept for foresight.

The real trick in life is to turn hindsight into foresight that reveals insight.

Yes there are times when you regret your decisions but we all have to make them without the power of hindsight.

At the end of things we turn into historians. Sometimes happy, sometimes nostalgic, sometimes regretful or bitter, sometimes to reassure ourselves that we have amounted to something, however small. And sometimes, as I am doing now, to try with the wisdom of hindsight to make sense of ourselves.

Distraught with the comprehension of his demise, a shovel stood dormant, in the ditch of her own digging. Now sheltered from the glare of greed and ambition, were the distasteful thoughts sprinkled in fool’s gold.

Does being true to one's self mean offering the literal truth or the truth that should have been, the truth of the image of one's self? It hardly matters by this time. By this time the border between seeing straight on and seeing round the corners of solid objects, between the world as smooth and coherent and the world as dissociated skinless particle, is thoroughly blurred. No longer a case of double vision, but of two separate eyes whose separate visions - what happened and what might have happened - come together in what we call the past, which we see with hindsight. Memory is revision. I have just destroyed another piece of my past, to tell a story.

Educated idiots are the most fearsome creatures in a leadership structure because even though trained they still refuse to think.

Everything seems obvious in hindsight!

Funny to do something and then realise the reason for it afterwards.

Heyday, now that is a funny word ain't it? Part of a heyday is, you don't never know you are having yourself one till later when it's all over with, long gone.

Hindsight’s a wonderful thing,” Klara said. “If we all had it there would be no history to write about.

Hindsight must surely be the most useless function of the human brain, torturing yourself over the unalterable past.

Hindsight, ever the cruelest and most astute adviser

I could think of no better place to secretly murder someone than inside a fridge. Well, actually there were probably several better ones, but none came to mind at the time.

How good the past can look from a rest stop in a bitter future!

I don't know if you have children of your own, Mariamjo, but if you do I pray that God look after them and spare you the grief that I have known. I still dream of them. I still dream of my dead children. I have dreams of you too, Mariam jo. I miss you. I miss the sound of your voice, your laughter. I miss reading to you, and all those times we fished together. Do you remember all those times we fished together? You were a good daughter, Mariam jo, and I cannot ever think of you without feeling shame and regret. Regret… When it comes to you, Mariamjo, I have oceans of it. I regret that I did not see you the day you came to Herat. I regret that I did not open the door and take you in. I regret that I did not make you a daughter to me, that l let you live in that place for all those years. And for what? Fear of losing face? Of staining my so called good name? How little those things matter to me now after all the loss, all the terrible things I have seen in this cursed war. But now, of course, it is too late. Perhaps this is just punishment for those who have been heartless, to understand only when nothing can be undone. Now all I can do is say that you were a good daughter, Mariamjo, and that I never deserved you. Now all I can do is ask for your forgiveness. So forgive me, Mariamjo. Forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me.

How you look at it is pretty much how you'll see it

A decision made during a moment of weakness can ruin your life.         To date, I had made three.

If Henry Adams, whom you knew slightly, could make a theory of history by applying the second law of thermodynamics to human affairs, I ought to be entitled to base one on the angle of repose, and may yet. There is another physical law that teases me, too: the Doppler Effect. The sound of anything coming at you -- a train, say, or the future -- has a higher pitch than the sound of the same thing going away. If you have perfect pitch and a head for mathematics you can compute the speed of the object by the interval between its arriving and departing sounds. I have neither perfect pitch nor a head for mathematics, and anyway who wants to compute the speed of history? Like all falling bodies, it constantly accelerates. But I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a sober sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats accepted, griefs borne. I don't find your life uninteresting, as Rodman does. I would like to hear it as it sounded while it was passing. Having no future of my own, why shouldn't I look forward to yours.

If there's anything worse in this world than a bad batch of babi guling, it's hindsight.

In the argument over whether knowledge is power or ignorance is bliss, it seems I've always come down on the side of ignorance. And when that's the side you fall on, you don't realize it until it's too late.

I think there is no difference between love and infatuation. If it works out, we call it love; if it doesn’t, we shrug our shoulders and say it was infatuation. It’s a hindsight word.