• If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us. But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us.

    Samuel Taylor Coleridge: If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us. But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us.
    In Thomas Allsop 'Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge' (18 December 1831)