From Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late 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 is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us!

(December 1831; cf. ImperfectStorm (2001-03-28), ...) - ^z - 2014-01-07