Who Said if You Dont Know Your History You Are Doomed to Repeat It

Those who cannot recall the by are condemned to repeat it.

To covet truth is a very distinguished passion.

George Santayana (16 December 1863 in Madrid, Spain – 26 September 1952 in Rome, Italian republic) was a philosopher, essayist, poet and novelist.

Quotes [edit]

The Sense of Beauty (1896) [edit]

Project Gutenberg; Archive.org; Hathi Trust

On fact, the whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, stock-still and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are then many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They correspond experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, similar the animals, did nosotros non go on ourselves afloat and straight our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps united states of america to bear our ignorance of fact.
- Pt. Three, Class; § 30: "The average modified in the direction of pleasance.", p. 125

Dazzler as we feel it is something indescribable: what it is or what it means tin can never be said.
- Pt. Iv, Expression; § 67: "Conclusion.", p. 267

Dazzler is a pledge of the possible conformity betwixt the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of religion in the supremacy of the skilful.
- Pt. Iv, Expression; § 67: "Conclusion.", p. 270

The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905-1906) [edit]

The Life of Reason (1905-1906) at Projection Gutenberg

Vol. I, Reason in Mutual Sense [edit]

[Everything] platonic has a natural footing and everything natural an ideal development.

Even the most inspired verse, which boasts non without a relative justification to be immortal, becomes in the form of ages a scarcely legible hieroglyphic; the linguistic communication it was written in dies, a learned teaching and an imaginative effort are requisite to catch even a vestige of its original strength. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.

Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.

That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.

Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.

Progress, far from consisting in modify, depends on retentiveness. When alter is absolute there remains no being to amend and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is non retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
- This famous statement has produced many paraphrases and variants:
  - Those who cannot acquire from history are doomed to repeat it.
  - Those who do not remember their past are condemned to repeat their mistakes.
  - Those who do not read history are doomed to echo it.
  - Those who fail to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors are destined to repeat them.
  - Those who exercise not know history'due south mistakes are doomed to repeat them.
- There is a similar quote by Edmund Shush (in Revolution in France) that oft leads to misattribution: "People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors."

Vol. Ii, Reason in Gild [edit]

The highest form of vanity is love of fame.

The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts; the feminine is a queen, infinitely fertile, omnipresent in its heart-searching industry, only passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice.

To call state of war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling immoderacy the soil of love.
- Ch. Three: Industry, Regime, the peasants

It is non gild'south fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation.
- Ch. IV: The Aristocratic Platonic

Injustice in this globe is non something comparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and accented in each individual fate.
- Ch. Four: The Aristocratic Ideal

Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble, it must remain rare, if common, it must get mean.
- Ch. IV: The Aristocratic Ideal

What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could non have existed in solitude: the aims of friendship, religion, scientific discipline, and art.
- Ch. V: Democracy

When men and women agree, it is but in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.
- Ch. 6: Gratis Lodge

In proportion as a man's interests become humane and his efforts rational, he appropriates and expands a common life, which reappears in all individuals who reach the same impersonal level of ideas.
- Ch. Viii: Ideal Lodge

About men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continual comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.
- Ch. 8: Ideal Society

Vol. Iii, Reason in Religion [edit]

Experience has repeatedly confirmed that well-known maxim of Bacon's that "a petty philosophy inclineth a man's listen to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men'southward minds nearly to organized religion." At the same time, when Salary penned that sage epigram... he forgot to add that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings dorsum men's minds is far from beingness the aforementioned from whom a little philosophy estranges them.
- Ch. I

Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover near his taste, nor condemn him, if we are simply, for knowing so human a passion.
- Ch. VI

Style is something vicious, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without do good.
- Ch. 7

Every moment celebrates obsequies over the virtues of its predecessor.
- Ch. XIV

Vol. IV, Reason in Art [edit]

To know how just a cause we have for grieving is already a consolation.

The heed celebrates a footling triumph whenever it tin can formulate a truth.
Art like life should exist costless, since both are experimental.

Vol. V, Reason in Science [edit]

History is nil but assisted and recorded memory. It might almost be said to be no science at all, if retentivity and religion in retentiveness were non what science necessarily remainder on. In order to sift testify we must rely on some witness, and we must trust experience before we proceed to expand it. The line between what is known scientifically and what has to be assumed in club to back up knowledge is impossible to describe. Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay inside the heed nosotros add the falsified echoes that attain the states from others, we take but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less like to the original experience which it purports to depict.
- Ch. 2 "History"

When Socrates and his two cracking disciples equanimous a system of rational ethics they were inappreciably proposing practical legislation for flesh...They were simply writing an eloquent epitaph for their country.

Oblivious of Democritus, the unwilling materialists of our twenty-four hour period have mostly been awkwardly intellectual and quite incapable of laughter. If they have felt anything, they take felt melancholy. Their allegiance and affection were notwithstanding fixed on those mythical sentimental worlds which they saw to be illusory. The mechanical world they believed in could non please them, in spite of its extent and fertility. Giving rhetorical vent to their spleen and prejudice, they exaggerated nature's meagreness and mathematical dryness. When their imagination was chilled they spoke of nature, most unwarrantably, equally expressionless, and when their judgment was heated they took the next step and chosen it unreal.
- Ch. 3 "Mechanism"

Introduction to The Ethics of Spinoza (1910) [edit]

Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude is, in one sense, overcome.

Maybe the only true dignity of man is his chapters to despise himself.

Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.

The Bible is literature, non dogma.

The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy (1911) [edit]

By their mind, its scope, quality, and temper, nosotros approximate men, for by the listen merely do we exist as men, and are more than so many storage-batteries for fabric free energy. Permit us therefore be frankly human.

To covet truth is a very distinguished passion.
- p. 48

Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained.
- pp. 48-49

No system would have ever been framed if people had been just interested in knowing what is true, whatever information technology may exist. What produces systems is the involvement in maintaining against all comers that some favourite or inherited idea of ours is sufficient and right. ** p. 49

Our nobility is not in what we practice, but in what we understand.
- p. fifty

To understand oneself is the archetype class of consolation; to elude oneself is the romantic.
- p. 51

In Walt Whitman republic is carried into psychology and morals. The various sights, moods, and emotions are given each one vote; they are declared to be all costless and equal, and the innumerable commonplace moments of life are suffered to speak like the others. Those moments formerly reputed bully are not excluded, just they are made to march in the ranks with their companions—plain foot-soldiers and servants of the hour.
- p. 53

Eternal vigilance is the cost of cognition.
- p. 58

The pint would telephone call the quart a dualist, if you tried to pour the quart into him.
- p. sixty

Because the peculiarity of man is that his machinery for reaction on external things has involved an imaginative transcript of these things, which is preserved and suspended in his fancy; and the interest and beauty of this inward landscape, rather than whatsoever fortunes that may expect his body in the outer world, constitute his proper happiness. By their mind, its scope, quality, and temper, we estimate men, for by the mind merely practice we exist as men, and are more than then many storage-batteries for material energy. Permit u.s. therefore be bluntly homo. Let us be content to live in the heed.
- p. 64

Winds of Doctrine: Studies in Contemporary Opinion (1913) [edit]

Whenever a nation is converted to Christianity, its Christianity, in practise, must be largely converted to paganism.
- p. 36

No uncertainty the spirit or energy of the world is what is acting in u.s.a., as the sea is what rises in every piffling moving ridge; merely it passes through us, and cry out equally we may, it will movement on. Our privilege is to have perceived information technology as it moves.
- p. 199

Our nobility is non in what we practice, but in what nosotros empathise. The whole globe is doing things.
- p. 199

Piffling Essays (1921) [edit]

The truth is cruel, just it can exist loved, and it makes gratuitous those who accept loved it.
- p. 107

Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922) [edit]

Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies at Annal.org

England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies, and humors.
- "The British Graphic symbol"

Never since the heroic days of Hellenic republic has the world had such a sweet, only, boyish primary.
- "The British Character"

The globe is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what information technology is pretending to be.
- "Dickens"

There is no cure for nascency and death save to enjoy the interval.
- "War Shrines"

To the mind of the ancients, who knew something of such matters, freedom and prosperity seemed hardly compatible, yet modern liberalism wants them together.
- "The Irony of Liberalism"

Prosperity, both for individuals and for states, means possessions; and possessions mean burdens and harness and slavery; and slavery for the mind, too, because it is non simply the rich man'southward time that is pre-empted, merely his angel, his sentence, and the range of his thoughts.
- "The Irony of Liberalism"

Liberal philosophy, at this point, ceases to be empirical and British in order to become German and transcendental. Moral life, it now believes, is non the pursuit of liberty and happiness of all sorts past all sorts of different creatures; it is the evolution of a unmarried spirit in all life through a series of necessary phases, each college than the preceding ane. No human being, appropriately, can really or ultimately desire annihilation but what the best people want. This is the principle of the higher snobbery; and in fact, all hostage liberals are higher snobs.
- "The Irony of Liberalism"

It is not politics that can bring true liberty to the soul; that must be accomplished, if at all, by philosophy;
- "The Irony of Liberalism"

Liberalism has merely cleared a field in which every soul and every corporate involvement may fight with every other for domination. Whoever is victorious in this struggle will make an terminate of liberalism; and the new guild, which will deem itself saved, will accept to defend itself in the post-obit historic period confronting a new crop of rebels.
- "The Irony of Liberalism"

I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world; only individual wealth I should refuse, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take abroad my liberty.
- "The Irony of Liberalism"

Simply the dead take seen the end of war.
- "Tipperary"

My atheism, similar that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies simply gods fashioned past men in their own image, to exist servants of their human being interests.
- "On My Friendly Critics"

The living take never shown me how to live.
- "On My Friendly Critics"

Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are.
- "On My Friendly Critics"

Friendship is almost always the union of a function of one heed with the part of another; people are friends in spots.
- "Friendships"

Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923) [edit]

Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the commencement comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at final, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it tin can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.
- The Works of George Santayana p. 65

[The empiricist] thinks he believes only what he sees, merely he is much better at believing than at seeing.
- "Objections to Belief in Substance", p. 201

Dialogues in Limbo (1926) [edit]

Philosophers are equally jealous equally women. Each wants a monopoly of praise.
- P. 30

The soul, too, has her virginity and must drain a little before bearing fruit.
- "Normal Madness," Ch. 3, P. 56

The fellow who has non wept is a cruel, and the former man who will not laugh is a fool.
- Ch. 3, P. 57

All living souls welcome whatsoever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and incorrect, or deny to be possible.
- Ch. 3, P. 62

Religion in its humility restores man to his simply dignity, the courage to live past grace.
- Ch. 4

Character and Stance in the U.s.a. (1920) [edit]

American life is a powerful solvent. As it stamps the immigrant, almost before he tin speak English, with an unmistakable muscular tension, cheery self-confidence and habitual challenge in the voice and eyes, so it seems to neutralize every intellectual element, still tough and conflicting it may be, and to fuse it in the native good-volition, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.
- "The Academic Environment" p. 47 (Hathi Trust)

All his life he [the American] jumps into the train after it has started and jumps out earlier it has stopped; and he never once gets left behind, or breaks a leg.
- "Materialism and Idealism" p. 175 (Hathi Trust)

Persons and Places (1944) [edit]

At midday the daily food of all Spaniards was the puchero or cocido, equally the dish is actually called which the foreigners phone call pot-pourri or olla podrida. This contains principally yellow chick-peas, with a footling salary, some potatoes or other vegetables and normally besides small pieces of beef or sausage, all boiled in one pot at a very slow fire; the liquid of the same makes the substantial broth that is served offset.
- p. 14

... I once shook hands with Longfellow at a garden political party in 1881; and I oft saw Dr. Holmes, who was our neighbour in Buoy Street: but Emerson I never saw.
- p. 50

Animals are born and bred in litters. Solitude grows blessed and peaceful only in sometime age.
- p. 61

In solitude it is possible to love mankind; in the world, for one who knows the world, there can be nothing only secret or open up war.

I was even so "at the church door". All the same in belief, in the clarification of my philosophy, I had taken an important footstep. I no longer wavered betwixt alternative views of the world, to be put on or taken off like alternative plays at the theatre. I at present saw that in that location was but ane possible play, the bodily history of nature and of mankind, although there might well be ghosts amidst the characters and soliloquies amongst the speeches. Religions, all religions, and idealistic philosophies, all idealistic philosophies, were the soliloquies and the ghosts. They might exist eloquent and profound. Like Hamlet's soliloquy they might be first-class reflective criticisms of the play as a whole. Nevertheless they were only parts of it, and their value every bit criticisms lay entirely in their fidelity to the facts, and to the sentiments which those facts aroused in the critic.
- p. 169

Other works [edit]

O world, thou choosest non the better function!
Information technology is not wisdom to exist only wise,
And on the inward vision close the eyes,
But it is wisdom to believe the heart.
Columbus found a earth, and had no chart,
Salve one that religion deciphered in the skies;
To trust the soul's invincible surmise
Was all his science and his only art.
- O Globe, Thou Choosest Not (1894)

In the Gospels, for example, we sometimes find the kingdom of heaven illustrated by principles drawn from observation of this world rather than from an platonic conception of justice; ... They remind us that the God we are seeking is present and agile, that he is the living God; they are doubtless necessary if we are to keep religion from passing into a mere idealism and God into the vanishing point of our thought and endeavour.
- Interpretations of Poetry and Organized religion (1900), p. 54

Although a poem be not made by counting of syllables upon the fingers, notwithstanding "numbers" is the nigh poetical synonym nosotros have for verse, and "measure out" the virtually significant equivalent for beauty, for goodness, and possibly fifty-fifty for truth. Those early and profound philosophers, the followers of Pythagoras, saw the essence of all things in number, and it was by weight, measure, and number, as we read in the Bible, that the Creator commencement brought Nature out of the void.
- Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900), p. 251

There is nada impossible in the existence of the supernatural: its existence seems to me incomparably likely.
- The Genteel Tradition at Bay (1931)

They [the wise spirits of artifact in the first circle of Dante's Inferno] are condemned, Dante tells us, to no other penalty than to alive in desire without hope, a fate advisable to noble souls with a articulate vision of life.
- Obiter Scripta (1936)

Skepticism, like guiltlessness, should non be relinquished too readily.
- George Santayana, as quoted in Quotations for Our Time (1977) edited past Laurence J. Peter

I exit you lot but the sound of many a word
In mocking echoes haply overheard,
I sang to sky. My exile made me free,
from world to globe, from all worlds carried me.
- The Poet's Attestation

The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity.
- The Idea of Christ in the Gospels (1946)

A kid educated only at school is an uneducated child.
- "Why I Am Not a Marxist" "Modernistic Monthly: Book: 9″ (Apr 1935); Folio: 77-79.

Disputed [edit]

Religions are non truthful or fake, but better or worse.
- This statement is presented in quotes in The Philosophy of Religion and Advaita Vedanta (2008) by Arvind Sharma, p. 216, as a "Santayanan point", but earlier publications by the same writer, such equally in A Fundamental Perspective on the Philosophy of Religion‎ (2006), p. 161, state it to be a stance of Santayana without really indicating or in any means implying that information technology is a directly quotation.

The earth has music for those who listen.
- This statement is commonly associated with Santayana, but no source or attribution can be found in his works or correspondence. *UPDATE: This quote is accordingly attributed to Reginald Vincent Holmes (1955, Fireside Fancies, Edwards Brothers Inc.)

Misattributed [edit]

The working of smashing administrations is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self-interest, carelessness and sheer fault. Only a residual fraction is idea.
- Giorgio de Santillana (1902-1974) The Criminal offense of Galileo (1958)
- Many sources mistakenly attribute this quote to Santayana, and i even identifies the right book, without realizing that George Santayana and Giorgio de Santillana are 2 different people

The famous George Santayana quote: "Those who forget the by are condemned to repeat information technology." That's the thing, though. None of us have forgotten. Darned if nosotros're non repeating information technology anyhow... ~ Mark Bradley (22 June 2020)

Quotes about Santayana [edit]

The famous George Santayana quote: "Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it." That'south the thing, though. None of us have forgotten. Darned if we're not repeating it anyhow...
- Confederate flags and a noose: What century is this, anyway?, By Marker Bradley, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (22 June 2020)

Books are "imaginative rehearsals for living," stated novelist George Santayana. They are also a cracking equalizer in a diverse gild. Book reading helps gear up a child for mental liberation from ignorance, fright, and falsehood.
- The lockdown's lesson in reading books aloud, Christian Scientific discipline Monitor, (22 June 2020)

The writer-philosopher George Santayana is credited with the phrase: "Those who cannot recall the past are condemned to repeat information technology." However hither we are, repeating that of just 52 years ago. Permit united states pray that come 2072, Americans then have at final heeded Santayana's warning and Dr. King's dream is no longer words in a spoken language but reality being lived.
- Geoff Caldwell: How long will history have to repeat before nosotros acquire?, The Joplin Earth (Jun 21, 2020)

Merely what a perfection of rottenness in a philosophy!
- William James, of Santayana's The Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900), in a alphabetic character to George H. Palmer (1900), every bit quoted in George Santayana : A Biography (2003) by John McCormick

"In America literary reputations come and go so swiftly," I complained, fatuously. [Santayana'south] respond was swift. "It would be insufferable if they did not."
- Gore Vidal, in Palimpsest, A Memoir (1995)

"There is no God, and Mary is his mother." Ofttimes, almost certainly incorrectly, attributed to Santayana himself. More plausibly attributed to Robert Lowell, as a sardonic description of Santayana'due south philosophy.
- Paul Mariani, "Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell" (1994), p. 159

Santayana, indeed, is the Moses of the new naturalism, who discerned the promised land from afar but withal wanders himself in the desert realms of being.
- John Herman Randall, "The Nature of Naturalism", epilogue to Naturalism and the Human Spirit (1944)

External links [edit]

Wikisource has original works written by or most:

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Net Encyclopedia of Philosophy
The Santayana Edition
Works by George Santayana at Project Gutenberg
Works by or almost George Santayana at Archive.org
Works by Santayana at the Online Books Page
All-encompassing sourced quotations from Santayana
Santayana Society
Overheard in Seville: Bulletin of the Santayana Club
Complimentary audio recording of Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy from LibriVox
Profile at FInd a Grave

leskotetly1995.blogspot.com

Source: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_Santayana