A quote of the day from writer Melvyn Bragg. He continues:

[Hindsight] is corrupting and distorting and pays no respect to the way life is really lived – forwards, generally blindly, full of accidents, fortunes and misfortunes, patternless and often adrift. Easy with hindsight to say we would beat Napoleon at Waterloo: only by a whisker, according to the honest general who did it. Easy to say we would win the Second World War: ask those who watched the dogfights of the Battle of Britain in Kent in 1940. Easy to say the Berlin Wall was bound to fall. Which influential commentator or body of opinion said so in the 1980s? Hindsight is the easy way to mop up the mess which we call history; it is too often the refuge of the tidy-minded, making neat patterns when the dust has settled. As often as not, when the dust was flying, no one at the time knew what the outcome might be.

Source: Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: 500 AD to 2000, The Biography of a Language. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2003, pp. 39-40.