Top 100 Quotes About After The Fact
#1. It's only after the fact that we trace the lines, join dots between things, skip over anything that doesn't fit. We make stories to account for everything that's happened. It's nice to think the world makes sense. It's nice to think that you make sense. But sometimes things just happen.
Kirsty Logan
#2. The community does not fight crime well by chasing it; after-the-fact, crime has won and the target of violence is injured or worse. Crime is fought best not by chasing it, but by facing it before it can become a completed act.
Crime is fought best at the scene of the violence.
John Longenecker
#3. Preservationists are the only people in the world who are invariably confirmed in their wisdom after the fact.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#4. There was no way to grasp the reality of the present which slid away each second, invisible as air; reality only existed after the fact, in one's vision of the past.
Paula Fox
#5. Although there was a screenplay, the actors never knew what questions I was going to ask them, and all of my character's voice-over narration and scenes were added after the fact.
Griffin Dunne
#6. Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.
William S. Burroughs
#7. I think an editing style is something that is ascribed to the work after-the-fact. I don't think you go in with a particular intention, but I think if there is an integrity to the work and the material you are working with, the work comes from the nature of that material.
Jay Cassidy
#8. Venting your primal self in an emotional moment can be more than your socially constructed self can handle after the fact," Alex says, her eyes gliding over me. "Look at you. Your hands are shaking. Your voice is weak. And your conscience is reasserting itself.
Mindy McGinnis
#9. but the older he got, the better he understood; forgiveness was an act done after the fact - a piece of the bad deeds future - and if you point the people's eyes to the future they might not see what is being done to hurt them in the present.
Yaa Gyasi
#11. careful scientific studies have revealed that a lot of conscious "decisions" that we think we make are actually rationalizations after the fact.
A. David Redish
#12. Maybe I could do it."
Darius shot him a dry look. "You want to try to get back into your house after the fact? Wellsie will stake you through the heart and leave you for the sun, my friend.
Tohrment winced. "Good point"
"And then she'll come looking for me."
Both males shuttered.
J.R. Ward
#13. I finished by saying that it struck me that all the ethical systems I was discussing were after the fact. That is, that people act as they are disposed to, but they like to feel afterwards that they were right and so they invent systems that approve of their dispositions.
Alexei Panshin
#14. By depriving the charged person of any defenses [the rulings] mean that sexual dalliance, however voluntarily engaged in, becomes harassment whenever an employee sees fit, after the fact, so to characterize it.
Robert Bork
#15. Things are always obvious after the fact. The civil servant was a very intelligent person, and this mistake is much more prevalent than one would think. It has to do with the way our mind handles historical information.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#16. THE DOWNFALL OF ambition is sometimes letting life pass you by and only realizing it did so after the fact.
Claire Contreras
#17. I hate prophesies! All they're good for is an extra club to beat yourself up with after the fact.
Ursula Vernon
#18. Anderson Cooper has a job to do. And that job is to try to reinforce his credibility in the gay community after the fact that you couldn't get him out of the closet for 10 years with a canister of tear gas. Now he's the sheriff; now he's running around writing everybody a ticket!
Alec Baldwin
#19. No. I just don't want to be a detective. They figure out what happened after the fact, when it's too late. I want to prevent it from happening.
Jennifer Echols
#20. Just because something makes sense after the fact doesn't mean it was obvious all along.
Sam Gosling
#21. Perspective is a bitch when it slaps you in the face, after the fact
Madeline Sheehan
#22. Relevance is not something you can predict. It is something you discover after the fact.
Thomas Sowell
#23. Truth has this habit of changing after the fact, don't you find?
David Mitchell
#24. The problem with every story is you tell it after the fact.
Chuck Palahniuk
#25. Even now, at least thirty thousand years after the fact, the signal is discernible: all non-Africans, from the New Guineans to the French to the Han Chinese, carry somewhere between one and four percent Neanderthal DNA.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#26. Your conscious life is an elaborate after-the-fact rationalization of things you really do for other reasons.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
#28. Little countries do not have this luxury of defending themselves. We have to do it before the fact, not after the fact
Charles Taylor
#29. If I think about what other people are thinking when I'm making music, I just can't do it. It's too withheld - I need to go totally over the top, and then kind of clean it up a bit and make it more reasonable after the fact.
Grimes
#30. Sorrow for a wrong was better than nothing ... but no amount of after-the-fact sorrow could ever atone for joy taken in destruction ...
Stephen King
#31. After the fact, our hearts always go out to the fallen Goliaths. Yet we invariably root for their Davids. Until they're winners.
Malcolm Forbes
#32. The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.
Marge Piercy
#33. Some after-the-fact storytelling is inevitable, and, in fact, very good and useful. But then we want always to be able to enrich the stories, or maybe change the stories with a fresh infusion of specificity.
Nicholson Baker
#34. Students are often in no position to judge 'relevance' until long after the fact.
Thomas Sowell
#35. The fact that people still talk and obsess about 'Twin Peaks', more than twenty years after the fact, is a great validation for what we thought we had going at the time.
Mark Frost
#36. But it doesn't have to be this way. We can do things better. We need to stop doing business as usual and start focusing on end-to-end quality. Security needs to be built in from the start - not slapped on after the fact.
Gene Spafford
#37. If Todd [Willingham] was guilty of anything, it was just his self-preservation. He got up and ran out of the house and then thought about the children after the fact.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#38. Events," I say to the Captain, "events control our lives, although we have no understanding of them nor do they have any motivation. Everything is blind chance, happenstance, occurrence; in an infinite universe anything can happen. After the fact we find reasons.
Barry N. Malzberg
#39. My fate has been that what I undertook was fully understood only after the fact.
Benoit Mandelbrot
#40. At its core, stress is simply a state of mind. Everything else is after the fact.
Kiran Dintyala
#41. Doing comedy for film is always a challenge because you are in the hands of the editor after the fact. I am hoping I can do some more soon, I enjoy doing comedy.
Tim Roth
#42. We often take vengeance long after the fact upon blameless surrogates, reprising the same sins of the ones who trespassed against us, and so perpetuate ad infinitum the pain we suffered at their hands.
Rick Yancey
#43. I'm not a huge TV person, but when I do watch, it's always after the fact because I like to binge watch.
Alia Shawkat
#44. She told me the French expression [Esprit de l'escalier] - the spirit of the staircase - for the voice that catches up with you, minutes after the fact, to make fun of whatever you said and come up with the perfect answer you didn't think of. We even had our own code phrase: SOS, we called it.
Francine Prose
#45. Nobody can pretend to know what people want to read or hear or see. People rarely know it themselves; they only know it after the fact.
Cecelia Ahern
#46. I don't want to be George Lucas and go back after the fact.
Patrick Stump
#47. My actions were intended solely to secure the repayment of funds, which I considered to be in the public interest, and I accept sole responsibility. I did not advise the prime minister of the means by which Sen. Duffy's expenses were repaid, either before or after the fact.
Nigel S. Wright
#48. Michael Winter's fiction is a lot like hearing him talk about his life ... harrowing in an after-the-fact hilarious way. Full of wonder and mystery. A hangover you wouldn't miss for the world.
Michael Crummey
#49. Years after the fact, when people asked me how I got into the horse business, the answer was always the same: "I saw Secretariat.
George Rowand
#50. You can make yourself crazy, refiguring it all after the fact. You did what you thought was best at the time. You helped a friend. That's what matters.
Craig Lancaster
#51. It's all well and good to look back after the fact and see what we should have done, but we rarely know what path is best when we take that first step.
Christine Feehan
#52. Steve had grown comfortable with only seeing the connections between the dots after the fact. Maturity, and the extraordinary talents of the team he had built, made that possible.
Brent Schlender
#53. There were signs. Probably more of them than I ever caught, even after the fact. But I missed them all.
Maybe because I wasn't looking for them. I was too busy checking over my shoulder at the fire I'd
just come through to pay much attention to the thousand-foot cliff looming in front of me.
Gayle Forman
#54. We are prone to blame decision makers for good decisions that worked out badly and to give them too little credit for successful moves that appear obvious only after the fact.
Daniel Kahneman
#55. I believe in our side and theirs, with the good and evil decided after the fact, by those who survive. Among men you seldom find the good with one standard and the shadow with another.
Glen Cook
#56. It was always easier to be disgusted after the fact. It was easier to shake your head and be outraged, as if the outrage was proof of civility - a sign that the world hadn't died, that it could still scream out in horror, proof that its heart was still beating.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#57. Sometimes the price one pays for something continues to grow after the fact,becoming too expensive long after it has been paid.
Jenny Erpenbeck
#58. I always just try to write the best songs that I can at any given time, and sometimes those songs are for me, and sometimes they're for other people. And that's to be evaluated after the fact.
Chris Stapleton
#59. -Speaking about Vaccinations -
If you accept the truth after the fact, the pain will last a life time.
Richard Diaz
#60. I'm genuinely curious about people, and I'm always interested when people do share with me. But I would not want someone to share something with me and then after the fact feel uncomfortable or regret it.
Alison Rosen
#61. We grow as best we can under the circumstances given us. What good does it do to second-guess ourselves years after the fact? Better that we simply try to understand why we are as we are and then better ourselves by learning from that.
Terry Brooks
#62. If you think about all the light that enters - that enters the lens of a camera, that's much more than a photo. The light field is all the higher-dimensional information that's lost in a regular photo. When we record all this information, that provides us the opportunity in software after the fact.
Ren Ng
#63. Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the others, the brain rationalizes the outcome after the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along.
Michio Kaku
#64. ...sex is a commitment. You are gifting another human being with access to the deepest part of yourself; you are sharing with them a bit of your soul. You are forging a connection that can never be undone--no matter how much you may want to undo it after the fact.
Zofie Kae
#65. To put the flesh of an animal into one's belly makes one an accessory after the fact of its slaughter, simply because if cows, pigs, sheep, fowl, and fish, to mention the most common, were not eaten they would not be killed.
Philip Kapleau
#66. Religion, ideology, resources, land, spite, love or just because ... No matter how pathetic the reason, it's enough to start war. War will never cease to exist ... reasons can be thought up after the fact ... Human nature pursues strife.
Masashi Kishimoto
#67. I don't spend a lot of time watching my performances after the fact. I suck at playing video games, but I'm a fan of the creativity, the brilliance, and the possibility of the industry.
Jennifer Hale
#68. I believe that things just happen in life, and pretty much after the fact, we make up a story to make it all seem rational. We all like simple stories that suggest a causal chain to life's events. Yet randomness is ever present.
Michael S. Gazzaniga
#69. It was spontaneously composed as I was playing it. And then I added a couple of other overdub textures on top of it after the fact. But it's one of those things where I wouldn't be able to sit down and specifically write that. That's just what came out.
Dweezil Zappa
#70. Hindsight is wonderful. It's always very easy to second guess after the fact.
Helen Reddy
#71. I'm not religious anymore, but I think it's like papal infallibility, which is a ridiculous man-made tenet, like what I believe most religious tenets to be, are man-made after the fact.
Janeane Garofalo
#72. The most prevalent way of working in photography right now is project oriented: you go after an idea. I like the old way, the intuitive approach. You follow your nose and take pictures and see what emerges. It happens after the fact.
Mark Klett
#73. Art comes after the fact, as a witness to certain things that have happened.
Raymond Pettibon
#74. Trust your intuitive heart. How often have you said to yourself, after the fact, "I knew I should have done that"? How often do you intuitively know something but allow yourself to think yourself out of it?
Richard Carlson
#75. I dated a guy for over a year who lied about his age the entire time. I found out after the fact and couldn't believe it! I even threw him a birthday party for the wrong age ... I couldn't get over how hard he had tried to keep it a secret!
Kirsten Prout
#76. No matter how invasive the technologies at their disposal, marketers and pollsters never come to terms with the living process through which people choose products or candidates; they are looking at what people just bought or thought, and making calculations based on that after-the-fact data.
Douglas Rushkoff
#77. Unlike regular digital or film cameras, which can only record a scene in two dimensions, light field cameras capture all of the light rays traveling in every direction through a scene. This means that some aspects of a picture can be manipulated after the fact.
Ren Ng
#78. What again I tell my people is that no matter how much you know, it's never enough. You will always discover, after the fact, that you've missed something.
Lakhdar Brahimi
#79. It's a good fact to meet a stranger,but unfortunate when they have bad intentions in meeting you after the fact. Just know you have been a loyal from the beginning.
Touaxia Vang
#80. While you're deep in something, you never say or do what you need to. It's always after the fact, when it's too late, that you realize what you should've said or done.
Jennifer L. Armentrout
#81. We're going to be able to ask our computers to monitor things for us, and when certain conditions happen, are triggered, the computers will take certain actions and inform us after the fact.
Steve Jobs
#82. The final state of affairs may not have been foreseen. Perhaps we are merely reading a plan into the world after the fact.
B.F. Skinner
#83. You'll very rarely find that you can enhance a performance to give it a real emotional centre and truth ... after the fact.
Andy Serkis
#84. A lot of my movies have come to be thought about only years after the fact, and I'm sad about that but also happy about it in a way, as it's given them longevity.
Nicolas Roeg
#85. I certainly supported a woman's right to choose, but to my mind the time to choose was before, not after the fact.
Ann B. Ross
#86. News is important information that may influence your investments. Noise is talk or buzz or some headline that prevents you from seeing a story clearly. News is useful. Noise is a distraction. Calling what's noise and news after the fact is easy.
Maria Bartiromo
#87. That the printer had quietly reset The Fellowship of the Ring, and that copies had been issued without proof having been read by the author, never became known to Tolkien; while his publisher, Rayner Unwin, learned of it only thirty-eight years after the fact.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#88. A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in light of the information available until that point
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#89. Revolution in America begins in books and music, then waits for political operatives to 'implement changes after the fact.'
William S. Burroughs
#90. How can something feel so crucial in the moment and then seem completely trivial after the fact?
Paula Stokes
#91. Diplomacy is what is practiced after-the-fact. Never be too right too soon
as any smart Uncle will tell you. The man who guesses what will happen will be blamed for it. No one will believe he has merely guessed.
Hortense Calisher
#93. The creation lives as genesis beneath the visible surface of the work. All intelligent people see this after the fact, but only the creative see it before the fact - in the future.
Paul Klee
#94. Because the question for me was always whether that shape we see in our lives was there from the beginning or whether these random events are only called a pattern after the fact. Because otherwise we are nothing.
Cormac McCarthy
#95. I often find things at thrift stores and library sales that I never could have been looking for. In those cases, the research is done after the fact to figure out what, exactly, I've found. It's surprising how much out there still has no online presence.
Michael Dumontier
#96. Only insofar as you enjoy being sorry, my dear, which, while it is a considerable amount, occurs only after the fact, thus making it a singularly ineffective deterrent, yes?
Jacqueline Carey
#97. We can't make decisions after the fact. We can only learn from them (mistakes) and let them guide us in our future decisions." ~Prince of Warwood and the King's Key
J. Noel Clinton
#99. To say simply that Orientalism was a rationalization of colonial rule is to ignore the extent to which colonial rule was justified in advance by Orientalism, rather than after the fact.
Edward W. Said
#100. We enjoyed the fact that we were called to the folk festivals and we got to know Joan Baez, Dylan. We were singing strictly gospel, but then after we started hearing songs that they would sing, we saw that those songs were very fitting for us because they were singing the truth, and truth is gospel.
Mavis Staples
