Hindsight's Quotes

#1. Hindsight's a wonderful thing," Klara said. "If we all had it there would be no history to write about.

Kate Atkinson

#2. No. Real love takes time to build. What you feel is just infatuation. (Geary) But it doesn't feel temporary. (Arik) It never does at its onset. It's only in hindsight that we realize the difference between infatuation and love. (Geary)

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#3. Going into Somalia, I didn't anticipate how many people's lives would be affected by it. In hindsight, I certainly wish I had taken more time to think about that, but I can't change it.

Amanda Lindhout

#4. There's a difference between thinking you can't be wrong and having no regrets. Wrongness is what occurs prior to empiricism, in hindsight a counterpart of revelation, and revelation is nothing to regret.

Criss Jami

#5. But that's hindsight for you: never there when you need it.

Janet Givens

#6. What seems like a crazy idea today eventually grows. It's a 'with hindsight' thing. One day, someone will turn around and say, 'That was genius.'

Natalie Massenet

#7. 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.

Kazuo Ishiguro

#8. Between hindsight bias, fake causality, positive bias, anchoring/priming, et cetera et cetera, and above all the dreaded confirmation bias, once an idea gets into your head, it's probably going to stay there.

Eliezer Yudkowsky

#9. Who's to say that our decisions are right or wrong without the benefit of hindsight?

Jennifer Paynter

#10. Nights like this," someone had told him, not so long ago, "feel like the world's waiting for something." He was sure, in hindsight, that on that night on a back step with a shared bottle of grocery store Pinot Noir, the girl beside him had wanted the two of them to be that something special.

Lauren Gilley

#11. I believe in love in hindsight, meaning attraction and connection can be remembered as love at first sight. But how could you possibly know at first sight? That's too much pressure to put on a relationship.

Greg Behrendt

#12. Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20 - 20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go.

Robert M. Pirsig

#13. 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.

Lee Smith

#14. 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.

Ted Yoho

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

S.A. Tawks

#16. At the time, when you're being dissected and judged it's pretty brutal, but in hindsight it's great and - it sounds cliched - you do come out the other side better and stronger.

Kate Bosworth

#17. If you're an artist, it's OK to put your money into your art. The advantage, in hindsight, is that you become the film, and the film becomes you; you breathe it.

Anton Corbijn

#18. The bad press came because they thought I should fight more. I couldn't get the fights because if I would sign to fight one of King's guys I would be signed to him. I chose not to do that. In hindsight, that might have been a mistake.

Gerry Cooney

#19. Even knowing everything, I would have chosen the same.
It's only in hindsight that we can point, as easily as finding a town on a map, to the moments that shaped us, - the moments when choices between yeses and noes determined the people we become.

Chelsey Philpot

#20. No way, man. I got one rule as a driver."
"What's that?"
"Never look in da rearview mirror."
"Never?" We drifted into the left-hand lane, cutting off a cab.
"It's not healthy to keep a' watchin' what you leavin' behind.

Marisha Pessl

#21. Presidents don't have the benefit of hindsight. You have to make difficult decisions based on the information that's before you at that moment.

Marco Rubio

#22. It's difficult to choose a Word of the Year in the year that you're in. It's one of those things that hindsight makes more apparent. It's like looking at pictures from 10 years ago, and you notice the flannel and the ripped jeans. At the time, it didn't look to you like a real fashion trend.

Erin McKean

#23. My father had a lifelong terror, phobia whatever, about hospitals. Makes a lot of sense in hindsight. He was so scared of doctors, he passed that on to me. That's what parents exist for: to pass their phobias on generation to generation.

Jackie Kay

#24. Collecting intelligence information is like trying to drink water out of a fire hydrant. You know, in hindsight It's great. The problem is there's a million dots at the time.

Louis Freeh

#25. Mother-daughter disagreements were, in hindsight, basically mother stating the truth and daughter taking her own sweet time coming around.

Barbara Delinsky

#26. 'Story of My Life' was essentially a two-man musical play. In hindsight, I don't know if there was room for a two-man musical on Broadway.

Will Chase

#27. He doesn't have anything like wisdom of age or hindsight. He's a biased historian of self, an emotional revisionist. We all are, for the most part.

Marc Maron

#28. And why do we worship hindsight (as in the news media's constant rehash of the day, the week, the year) and yet distrust foresight, which actually might make a difference in our lives?

Gavin De Becker

#29. In hindsight, I have no idea why he was ever with me. He thought highly of my breasts. And ... that's it, I think.

Emma Forrest

#30. In hindsight, I was totally unprepared for the truth. I will live without my children much longer than I lived with them. That's a difficult reality after submerging twenty years of my life into the responsibilities, joys, and frustrations of raising kids.

Elaine Ambrose

#31. Hindsight is 20/20, but the moral of the writing is that when you're feeling very scared about something and convinced that it could be a massive disaster, that's exactly the idea that you should do.

Damon Lindelof

#32. That's what love is, when your hindsight is 20/20, and you still wouldn't change a thing.

Jodi Picoult

#33. When I was four, I just wanted to drive, I collected toy cars. Where does that sort of thing come from? In hindsight you go, 'Oh, liked it because of this.' Maybe it's just the wheel.

Michael Fassbender

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

Edwin S. Shneidman

#35. Just because it's a novel--can't it also be different?

John G. Deaton

#36. 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.

Deborah Meyler

#37. Washington's task was to transform the improbable into the inevitable.

Joseph J. Ellis

#38. Much of our understanding of God's action in our lives in achieved in hindsight. When a particular crisis or event in our life has passed we cry out in astonishment like Jacob, 'The Lord is in this place and I never knew it.

Sheila Cassidy

#39. It's so difficult, isn't it? To see what's going on when you're in the absolute middle of something? It's only with hindsight we can see things for what they are.

S.J. Watson

#40. All decisions are different in hindsight. Maybe all we can do is make the best decisions we can in the moment, using the best information we have right then.

Miranda Kenneally

#41. But that's all hindsight. That evening, my mind was cloudy, and my good judgment was influenced by my need to prove something. It goes to show you, you shouldn't stay out too late during the week.

Nelson DeMille

#42. Hindsight is wonderful. It's always very easy to second guess after the fact.

Helen Reddy

#43. 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.

Don Swann II

#44. 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.

Abby Fabiaschi

#45. It's only in hindsight that you realize what indeed your childhood was really like.

Maya Lin

#46. Mom could say that in hindsight, but it seemed to me that when you were in the middle of something, it was awful hard to figure out what part of it was God's will and what wasn't.

Jeannette Walls

#47. I didn't appreciate the moment as much as I should have while living it, but I can attribute that to my poor emotional state and hindsight.

S.A. Tawks

#48. But everyone's an expert with the virtue of hindsight ...

Kate Morton

#49. You have to read scripts and audition and develop relationships. It takes a long time to develop a body of work but over the last 25 years I guess I've done that many movies. In hindsight it may seem effortless, but there's a lot of work that goes into it.

Harry Connick Jr.

#50. To me, the question of inspiration is an exercise in hindsight. The truth is, inspiration is mysterious at the time. I don't think it's ever a rational process.

Julia Leigh

#51. Frankly, to be honest, I hadn't worked for two years before 'Murphy Brown.' It's a nice illusion now to think of all of us as terribly successful and talented people at the top of our profession, but that's hindsight. I had to pray for a job like this.

Charles Kimbrough

#52. I was cursed with age, really. You do that stupid thing at 12 years old when you say something and it kind of sticks with you for the rest of your life. So, I believe I said I wanted to be a fishery manager. In hindsight, I think acting could be a better route.

Tom Felton

#53. The greater number of a man's errors come before him disguised under the specious form of necessity; then, after error has been committed in a moment of excitement, of delirium, or of fear, we see that we might have avoided and escaped it.

Alexandre Dumas

#54. He'd heard the saying hindsight was twenty-twenty, but that wasn't accurate.
Hindsight was a stupid motherfucking asshole.

Priscilla Glenn

#55. Hindsight is an exact science.

Guy Bellamy

#56. Hindsight is usually more tragic than helpful.

Linda S. Godfrey

#57. Before, you are wise; after, you are wise. In between you are otherwise

David Zindell

#58. I grew up in Ohio, where civil-rights accomplishments had already begun to accelerate before Martin Luther King appeared. In hindsight, we know that many people, black and white, were instrumental in changing the Jim Crow status quo on all levels.

Rita Dove

#59. We'd all be a bunch of geniuses if we had hindsight ahead of time.

Wally Lamb

#60. He loved me. I do not doubt that. In hindsight, I do not believe that I loved him. I simply felt his love for me, burning and all-consuming, and reflected it back, as the cold light of the moon reflects the light of the sun. I did not know that at the time. I thought I loved him.

Neil Gaiman

#61. This simple inability to remember not the true sequence of events but a reconstructed one will make history appear in hindsight to be far more explainable than it actually was - or is.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#62. She wished she had known back then. Known that happiness isn't a point in time you leave behind. It's what's ahead of you. Every single day.

Sarah Addison Allen

#63. In hindsight I can see that my love for the arts began by watching my father and his colleagues perform on stage in Jamaica, and running a muck among the exhibits of fabulous Jamaican art at the National Gallery while mum was upstairs curating.

Michael Hyatt

#64. I suppose it's true that most great television, literature, and other forms of high art (and basic cable) benefit from a little hindsight. 'M.A.S.H.' comes to mind. So does 'The Iliad.'

Kevin Bleyer

#65. I would find myself getting deeply distressed if I lived in hindsight all the time.

Andrew Lincoln

#66. The Battle of Normandy was won on the beaches of Dieppe

Louis Mountbatten

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

Peter F. Hamilton

#68. Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.

Hilary Mantel

#69. It is only with hindsight that we can see the paradigms of the past for the intellectual straitjackets they were.

Terryl L. Givens

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

Eleanor Roosevelt

#71. Hindsight is 20-20.

Ed Catmull

#72. In the financial markets, hindsight is forever 20/20, but foresight is legally blind. And thus, for most investors, market timing is a practical and emotional impossibility.

Benjamin Graham

#73. Hey! Remember the '90s?
The Clintons were in office, everybody was using AOL, Will Ferrell and Cheri Oteri did "the Cheerleaders" on SNL, and everybody thought Oasis was fantastic.
In hindsight, we were all a bunch of potato-salad-eating jackasses.

Julie Klausner

#74. There has to be insight born of hindsight. Otherwise, you're only confessing your sins and asking the reader to forgive you. And that is a complete misuse of the writer's power and unfair to the reader.

Meghan Daum

#75. It is easy to act as a Saturday morning quarterback and replay the game lost the night before. All of us seem to have better hindsight (the ability to see after the event what should have been done) than foresight

Carlos E. Asay

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

Adam Brody

#77. Heart thoughts are profound, hindsight aches and hope is obscure. I'm craving a great adventure
one that leads me back home.

Donna Lynn Hope

#78. Life has a peculiar feel when you look back on it that it doesn't have when you're actually living it. It's as though the whole thing were designed to be understood in hindsight, as though you'll never know the meaning of your experiences until you've had enough of them to provide reference.

Donald Miller

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

Clive James

#80. Looking back with the infallible benefit of hindsight, it's hard to imagine that anyone believed we could actually have stayed out of that damned war.

Craig Siegel

#81. Hindsight. It's like foresight without a future.

Kevin Kline

#82. In hindsight it was an inappropriate reaction

Michelle Gable

#83. May you have the hindsight to know where you've been, the foresight to know where you are going, and the insight to know when you have gone too far.

Heather Lyons

#84. Hindsight is not necessarily the best guide to understanding what really happened. The past is often as distorted by hindsight as it is clarified by it.

Amos Elon

#85. A moment of disruption is where the conversation about disruption often begins, even though determining that moment is entirely hindsight.

Steven Sinofsky

#86. Everything was such a damned nice idea when it was an idea.

Tim O'Brien

#87. Hindsight is pointless, Arnuff," said the other man in the room, who was equally as old as the first. "Bring me one of those," he said, referring to the drink Arnuff held. Arnuff poured another bourbon and brought it to the coffee table.

J.T. Bishop

#88. I've developed a much greater respect for our politicians and every high-tech CEO. It's very easy to read about the things they did that you, of course, would have avoided in hindsight.

Michael J. Saylor

#89. Is it true that we can count the moments in which something really happens in our lives? Do we notice it right away, or only in hindsight?

Jan-Philipp Sendker

#90. There are a few key moments in anyone's life. A person is fortunate if he can tell in hindsight when they happened.

Randy Pausch

#91. I would be hard-pressed to look back at anything that I have done in my career and not say, 'I would have done that a little different' because hindsight is 20/20.

Sam Huntington

#92. I was in New York City for September 11th, and I was there for the 2003 blackout. I think in hindsight, you get a real perspective as to how unique those moments of crisis are in a place like New York City.

Casey Neistat

#93. We all pine for a time in life when things were simpler. Even when they weren't necessarily simpler, hindsight makes them look a lot simpler. The reality of it was that it wasn't.

Ben Gibbard

#94. I went through in the edits and cut tons of stuff that was "funny" because if it wasn't funny at the time, so it shouldn't be funny now. It's about having that unity of experience. You have to try and take away your hindsight knowledge of a situation.

Damian Barr

#95. Hindsight is a wonderful thing but foresight is better, especially when it comes to saving life, or some pain!

William Blake

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

Kaimana Wolff

#97. I do not comment on my client's personal lives in the media. As for Luke, he did so once, a long time ago when he was an inexperienced, young actor and now with maturity and hindsight, he has learned not to engage the press in his personal life again.

Luke Evans

#98. The problem with comprehension is, it often comes too late.

Rasmenia Massoud

#99. She relived the frantic shopping and packing, the last teary gatherings with friends, the fear of a faceless roommate, the terror of academic failure. She also relived the excitement, because, in hindsight, going to college had been the single most pivotal point in her life.

Barbara Delinsky

#100. I screeched with frustration, which in hindsight is never okay when there are people trying to kill you.

Jessica Fortunato