Daniel Kahneman once told me about the stories people tell themselves to make sense of the past. He said: Hindsight, the ability to explain the past, gives us the illusion that the world is understandable. It gives us the illusion that the world makes sense, even when it doesn’t make sense. That’s a big deal in producing mistakes in many fields.

Hindsight is notably cleverer than foresight.

History's a stopped clock," Eunice said. "It's nice to look at, but there's only so much you can tell you.

History would be a wonderful thing – if it were only true.

History is wonderful. We have so much we can learn if we would quit making ideology out of history, and just deal with what happened…

History is not a burden on the memory but an illumination of the soul.

Perhaps it is with nostalgia that human beings look back in history as there is certainly a romanticisation of certain aspects of the past that erases the ugly deeds of human beings.

Imagine taking a test knowing the answer. While we know that history flows forward, it is difficult to realize that we envision it backward. Why is it so? We will discuss the point in Chapter 11 but here is a possible explanation: Our minds are not quite designed to understand how the world works, but, rather, to get out of trouble rapidly and have progeny. If they were made for us to understand things, then we would have a machine in it that would run the past history as in a VCR, with a correct chronology, and it would slow us down so much that we would have trouble operating. Psychologists call this overestimation of what one knew at the time of the event due to subsequent information the hindsight bias, the “I knew it all along” effect.

The miracle of hindsight is how it transforms great military geniuses of the past into incompetent idiots, and incompetent idiots of the present into great military geniuses. There is the door, and be sure to take all your pompous second-guessing delusions with you…’

Emperor Kellanved
On the occasion of the conquest of
Falari's Grand Council
(the Trial of Crust)

There's an old saying about those who forget history. I don't remember it, but it's good.

for in history there is nothing more pleasing than clear and brilliant brevity.

A fine thing: suddenly to forget about one’s history, one’s past, to stop feeling that one’s present happiness is endangered by what one used to be.

Wouldn't things look much better for the human race if we no longer had history, at least no political history? The human being then would act more in accordance with the energies he possesses at any given time; for as things stand today, the example that now and then makes one person better makes a thousand others worse.

What looks inevitable in hindsight is often invisible with foresight.