Chester W. Nimitz Quotes

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

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.

Hindsight is, of course, 20/20. Any time you go back, and you look at something, and now you've got the result of something, you say, 'Yeah, maybe it wasn't the right idea.'

You can't help but... with 20/20 hindsight, go back and say, 'Look, had we done something different, we probably wouldn't be facing what we are facing today.'

Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.

I used to drive myself crazy by thinking, three days later, 'Ugh, why didn't I play it like that? Ugh, now that line makes sense to me.'

You know, many a man realizes late in life that if when he was a boy he had known what he knows now, instead of being what he is he might be what he won't; but how few boys stop to think that if they knew what they don't know instead of being what they will be, they wouldn't be?

The lessons of experience are always learned too late.

That ability to see the right choice, but not until several hours have passed since making the wrong one? That's what makes a person a dumbass, folks.

I have quite a robust relationship with regret. You simply don't know what the alternative would have been.

It is better to sleep on things beforehand than lie awake about them afterwards.

I always see where I didn't do things the right way. I only see the heavy lifting. That's a bit of my wisdom, if you want to call it that.

I look back on my work and I think, 'Oh, why didn't I do that differently?'

You look at the road you could have taken, you know, I just think that's interesting... I've been on a lot of roads and I had to hitchhike on a couple of 'em... I have to be very honest: There's not an awful lot of regret in my life. I think that, you know, you learn from everything, and then, sometimes, you don't.

The rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield.

When the ship has sunk everyone knows how she might have been saved.

Yes, once—many, many years ago. I thought I had made a wrong decision. Of course, it turned out that I ha been right all along. But I was wrong to have thought I was wrong.

The further backward we look, the further forward we are likely to see.

The people would think I was a fool for not having taken twice as much.

Given the opportunity, I might change a choice I made, but you can't regret making what you thought was the best decision at the time.

We're constantly, as human beings, trying to understand why we do what we do and how we got to wherever we find ourselves today. Sometimes it takes a lot of time to look back and go, 'I can't believe I spent one day with that person, much less two years.'

To me, I look at situations and try to look back and see if there was anything I could have done.

With any possibly erroneous decision, you can always look back and think you could've done something differently - but always with the benefit of hindsight.

I wouldn't say I regret anything. I would say I just wish I did things better.

Win or lose, I'm up all night. I've been that way since college - I'm going over everything in my head: woulda, coulda, shoulda.