George Santayana
George Santayana
Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás, known in English as George Santayana, was a philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist. Originally from Spain, Santayana was raised and educated in the United States from the age of eight and identified himself as an American, although he always kept a valid Spanish passport. He wrote in English and is generally considered an American man of letters. At the age of forty-eight, Santayana left his position at Harvard and returned to Europe...
NationalitySpanish
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth16 December 1863
CityMadrid, Spain
CountrySpain
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.
Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.
History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten. ...What is interesting is brought forward as if it had been central and efficacious in the march of events, and harmonies are turned into causes. Kings and generals are endowed with motives appropriate to what the historian values in their actions; plans are imputed to them prophetic of their actual achievements, while the thoughts that really preoccupied them remain buried in absolute oblivion.
History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory.
Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.
The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form.
Sanity is madness put to good use.
History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
A country without a memory is a country of madmen.
Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies, and humors
England is not the best possible world but it is the best actual country, and a great rest after America