Tom Hollander Quotes

Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.

As you get further away from a presidency you are better able to assess that presidency.

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.

Subjective artists are one-eyed, but objective artists are blind.

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.'

You can only predict things after they have happened.

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

I find it hard to focus looking forward. So I look backward.

It's always what you did before. The year before is always so much better. Even when the critics hated what you did then, it always looks better five years later.

I always avoid prophesying beforehand, because it is a much better policy to prophesy after the event has already taken place.

The mark of a good action is that it appears inevitable in retrospect.

It is always awfully easy to say what she would have done after you haven’t done it

Time and again ... governments have rejected proposals today—and longed for them tomorrow.

You don’t make decisions in hindsight; you make them in the present. You live and learn.

Every advantage in the past is judged in the light of the final issue.

Historians often find important decisions few knew were important at the time.

There's a tendency when we write history to do it with the power of hindsight and then assume almost god-like knowledge that nobody living through history has.

In many cases, if we knew what it would take, we might have thought twice about it, so it's often wonderful that we don't have hindsight.

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.'

When you look back on things, your version is always perfect.

I think there's something inherently interesting in the Monday morning quarterback: the guy who, you know, sits at one end of the briefing room and tells everyone what they should've done and how they've screwed up.

We do not see and estimate the relative importance of objects so easily and clearly from the level or the waving land as from the elevation of a lone peak, towering above the plain; for each looks through his own mist.

Evil is obvious only in retrospect.

Those who made the decisions with imperfect knowledge will be judged in hindsight by those with considerably more information at their disposal and time for reflection.

It's always easy to judge from afar