History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.


George Santayana

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History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
History is something that never happened, written by a man who wasn't there.
ANON.
It's all a pack of lies and the National Enquirer was told it was a pack of lies.
BERT FIELDS
History is a pack of lies we play on the dead.
VOLTAIRE
The earth has its music for those who will listen
REGINALD VINCENT HOLMES
I believe that there is a Matrix and... to be more accurate I am in the Pornography Matrix.
DEYTH BANGER
If I have any complaints about my youth... one is that many well-meaning adults lied to me. Not spit...
CHRIS CRUTCHER
He's a world-famous name to people who care about his music, but there are many people who have ...
MICHAEL FEINSTEIN
Events, once happened, lose reality, alter with a glance, a storm, a night. In time, the past never ...
ALAN LIGHTMAN
History is the study of lies, anyway, because no witness ever recalls events with total accuracy, no...
NANCY PICKARD
History is usually told from the top down by politicians and academics. This is history as told thro...
DAVID ISAY
History is a set of lies agreed upon by the victors.
UNKNOWN
Never say there is no money,for there is never a time in history that people have said there is enou...
DAVID ATTA (A.K.A DAVIED ATTLARS & MR DAIN)
Of course they are a pack of lies.
SVEN GORAN ERIKSSON
Dates are convenient hooks on which we can hang our memories of events. But history is all about peo...
JOAN LOWERY NIXON
History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.
NAPOLEON
History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE
History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.
NAPOLéON BONAPARTE
Turks are waking up to two facts. One is that everything told to the Turkish people by EU leaders is...
BURAK TURNA
Anyone who knows history, particularly the history of Europe, will, I think, recognize that the domi...
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
He is the purest figure in history. About George Washington
WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE
He is the purest figure in history. [About George Washington]
WILLIAM E. GLADSTONE
There is no political connotation (to the march). This is a demonstration by the people of France wh...
JOSEPH SITRUK
History is nothing but a pack of tricks that we play upon the dead.
VOLTAIRE (FRANçOIS-MARIE AROUET)
History is nothing but a pack of tricks that we play upon the dead.
VOLTAIRE
History is nothing but a pack of tricks that we play on the dead.
VOLTAIRE
History is nothing but a pack of tricks that we play upon the dead
VOLTAIRE
The essential matter of history is not what happened but what people thought or said about it.
FREDERIC WILLIAM MAITLAND
International politics is never about democracy and human rights. It's about the interests of states...
EGON BAHR
The illusion is that most of my work is simply about past events: a point in history and nothing els...
KARA WALKER
Are we defined by the good that history has told us or are we lead astray by lies and deceit, so as ...
GARY F EVANS...
If people werent so selfish, i would be happier.
JAIME TENORIO VALENZUELA
History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by ruler...
AMBROSE GWINETT BIERCE
History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by ruler...
AMBROSE BIERCE
History is an account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers,...
AMBROSE BIERCE
the worst part about being lied to is knowing you werent worth the truth
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
I often say of George Washington that he was one of the few in the whole history of the world who wa...
ROBERT FROST
Folks with their wits about them knew that advertisements were just a pack of lies - you had only to...
FRANCES PARKINSON KEYES
This place was in an uproar. I've never seen this community in such a unified way. Everybody was jus...
DELMA COLLINS
At the end of the day, acting is all about telling lies. We are professional imposters and the audie...
PETE POSTLETHWAITE
Stress is never a given. There are people who get divorced amicably. There are people who pack up an...
ANDREW J. BERNSTEIN
On the one hand, there's a very romantic idea out there of what the South is all about. On the other...
JASON ISBELL
The Pen never lies, history does with vanity
DR.MOHAMMED FAIG ABAD ALRAZAK
History: An account, mostly false, of events unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly k...
AMBROSE BIERCE
The truth about life and lie about life is not measured by others but by your intuition, which never...
SANTOSH KALWAR
History lies under a heap of lies.
MUHAMMED HAIDER
The consummate gentleman on the planet today is George Clooney, who never fails to go the extra mile...
ANNA KENDRICK
The point is, art never stopped a war and never got anybody a job. That was never its function. Art ...
LEONARD BERNSTEIN
History, n. An account mostly false, of events unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly...
AMBROSE BIERCE
Captain Cook discovered Australia looking for the Terra Incognita. Christopher Columbus thought he w...
UMBERTO ECO
HISTORY, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by ruler...
AMBROSE BIERCE
History is a set of lies agreed upon.
NAPOLéON BONAPARTE
History is a set of lies agreed upon.
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE
[After White told McClendon what had happened, McClendon] wasn't too happy about it, ... Then, you s...
RICK WHITE
There is no lie that a man will not believe; and there is no man who does not believe many lies; and...
JOHN STERLING
There is no lie that a man will not believe; and there is no man who does not believe many lies; and...
JOHN STERLING
If history has shown anything, it is that where there is a God, there is an institution trying to lo...
ABHIJIT NASKAR
The people who make history are not the people who make it who are there but the people who make it ...
JULIAN COPE
I hope people understand how stupid segregation is. People should never judge a book by its color. B...
EUGENE RICHARDSON
People to whom nothing has ever happened cannot understand the unimportance of events.
T.S. ELIOT
There are two kinds of people who never amount to much: those who cannot do what they are told, and ...
CYRUS CURTIS
It's not about the past; it's about knowing your history so that you can fight in the presen...
RAOUL PECK
Mrs. Whiteley never smoked a pack of cigarettes that didn't have a health warning on it that was wri...
WILLIAM OHLEMEYER
There are two kinds of people: the ones who need to be told, and the ones who figure it out all by t...
TOM CLANCY
There are two kinds of people: the ones who need to be told and the ones who figure it out all by th...
TOM CLANCY
If we have told lies you have told half lies. A man who tells lies merely hides the truth, but a man...
THE BRITISH CONSUL.
There is one unmistakable lesson in American history: A community that allows a large number of youn...
DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN
Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven't the remotest knowledge of how to live, no...
OSCAR WILDE
The history of an oppressed people is hidden in the lies and the agreed myth of its conquerors.
MERIDEL LE SUEUR
The history of an oppressed people is hidden in the lies and the agreed myth of its conquerors.
MERIDEL LE SUEUR
There has never yet been a man in our history who led a life of ease whose name is worth remembering...
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
There were lies we told to save ourselves, and then there were lies we told to rescue others. What c...
JODI PICOULT
Nothing in the reporting of a nation's history could so mislead the younger generation as to rep...
GUSTAV STRESEMANN
When you start talking about why something happened or why it was done a certain way on a project, t...
TOM HAMILTON
It's a very bad situation. This has never happened in the resort's history.
ED YOUMANS
The Deep South has a completely different history, both good and bad, that is fascinating for everyb...
GENEVIEVE GORDER
When living is too sweet and swanky, it may be very hard to appreciate the simplest things in life. ...
ERIK PEVERNAGIE
Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live...
OSCAR WILDE
Documentaries deal with people who live real, everyday lives. But if these people trusted us and tol...
KRZYSZTOF KIESLOWSKI
Your Honor, I am in a difficult position. The news media has already executed me and buried me...If ...
CHARLES MANSON
This is not just about George Bush. This is about a tactic that's tried and true that is used by the...
LEIGH JOHNSON
Something new has happened: For the first time in German history our fatherland is guided by a plan ...
WALTER ULBRICHT
Church: A place in which gentlemen who have never been to Heaven brag about it to people who will n...
HENRY LOUIS MENCKEN
There is history the way Tolstoy imagined it, as a great, slow-moving weather system in which even t...
LOUIS MENAND
You can't write about history without writing about politics at some point. History is about mov...
DAVID MAMET
We are seeing history unfold, events that will shape the course of a country, the fate of a people a...
DONALD RUMSFELD
It is not acceptable that election winners interpret history. History should be left to historians w...
ERALDO BANOVAC
The truth is, it happened...just like she told all those people.
BARBARA WHALEY
There is beauty within all my imperfections, Within myself there lies a strength that can never be t...
RACHEL-ERIKA HENDERSON
But ya know what, I am a part of something that happened. I'm a part of the music that happened....
WAYLON JENNINGS
My pappy told me never to bet my bladder against a brewery or get into an argument with people who b...
LANE KIRKLAND
In your life you meet people. Some you never think about again. Some, you wonder what happened to th...
C.S. LEWIS
Since the election, since the formation of a government, the death in Iraq has increased. The United...
MARK SHIELDS
My six pack is protected by a layer of fat.
ANONYMOUS
There are but few important events in the affairs of men brought about by their own choice.
ULYSSES S. GRANT
And the other thing that's happened is that people who have eaten at their restaurant in Arlington h...
WILLIAM BOOKER
I told all the camera crews out there it was time to pack up and go home.
DENNIS FRAZIER
The white man made the mistake of letting me read his history books. He made the mistake of teaching...
MALCOLM X
But we talk about issues, we talk about people, we talk about personalities. George is a very good r...
LAURA BUSH
This is just a slimy trick by Big Tobacco to circumvent the system. An $8 pack of cigarettes still e...
ANNIE TEGEN

More George Santayana

The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions; ...
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Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Only the dead have seen the end of the war.
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The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradicti...
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We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past,...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Sanity is madness put to good use.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. when experience is not retained, ...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Every actual animal is somewhat dull and somewhat mad. He will at times miss his signals and stare v...
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Not to believe in love is a great sign of dullness. There are some people so indirect and lumbering ...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The truth is cruel, but it can be loved and it makes free those who have loved it.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crim...
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It would repel me less to be a hangman than a soldier, because the one is obliged to put to death on...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are fri...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature; so that ambition may ...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live witho...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death sup...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The g...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The working of great institutions is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with a part of another: people are frien...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subj...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Sanity is a madness put to good uses.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old ag...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflecti...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of th...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a v...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Man is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind than in his body. He may like to go alone f...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Man is as full of potential as he is of importance.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Nietzsche was personally more philosophical than his philosophy. His talk about power, harshness, an...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
A man's feet must be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
There is (as I now find) no remorse for time long past, even for what may have mortified us or made ...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight to the blo...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the bett...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot thr...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeab...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The human mind is not rich enough to drive many horses abreast and wants one general scheme, under w...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principals to trifles.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to pres...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The empiricist... thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at s...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The highest form of vanity is love of fame.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Habit is stronger than reason.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute th...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Intolerance itself is a form of egoism, and to condemn egoism intolerantly is to share it.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without bene...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The family is an early expedient and in many ways irrational. If the race had developed a special se...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Oaths are the fossils of piety.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own infinitude, and his infinitude is, in one sens...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Nonsense is good only because common sense is so limited.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Our dignity is not in what we do, but what we understand.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Depression is rage spread thin.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
To be interested in the changing seasons is, in this middling zone, a happier state of mind than to ...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occu...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Many possessions, if they do not make a man better, are at least expected to make his children happi...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in t...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentabl...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of t...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience — the u...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with a part of another; people are frien...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the f...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
To fight is a radical instinct; if men have nothing else to fight over they will fight over words, f...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Our dignity is not in what we do, but what we understand.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited
GEORGE SANTAYANA
One real world is enough.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Progress, far from consisting of change, depends on retentiveness... Those who cannot remember the...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little long...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love wi...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Words are weapons, and it is dangerous . . . to borrow them from the arsenal of the enemy.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Sanity is a madness put to good use.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
There is nothing sweeter than to be sympathized with.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The universe, as far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The Soul is the voice of the body's interests.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to it...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Music is essentially useless, as life is.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinge what we th...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
I like to walk about among the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should de...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humo...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Each religion, by the help of more or less myth, which it takes more or less seriously, proposes som...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned ...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects i...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the anci...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour and possess what we mean. Knowledge is recog...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships ...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships ...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and, were it not assumed, the most i...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, ...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his ...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his ...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much and had nothing t...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval
GEORGE SANTAYANA
America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the med...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The little word is has its tragedies: it marries and identifies different things with the greatest i...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The wisest mind has something yet to learn.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The truth is cruel, but it can be loved and it makes free those who love it.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minute...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Repetition is the only form of permanence that nature can achieve.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
People are usually more firmly convinced that their opinions are precious that that they are true.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Life is not a spectacle or a feast: it is a predicament.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
If one is the master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has at the same time insight i...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Before he sets out, the traveler must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
America is a young country with an old mentality.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
A man is morally free when, in full possession of his living humanity, he judges the world, and judg...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Our character...is an omen of our destiny, and the more integrity we have and keep, the simpler and ...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentabl...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Life is not a spectacle or feast; it is a predicament.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there rem...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The young man who has not wept is a savage,
and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Why shouldn't things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? They are so, and we are so, and they...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blo...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Catastrophes come when some dominant institution, swollen like a soap-bubble and still standing with...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imagin...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
To condemn spontaneous and delightful occupations because they are useless for self-preservation sho...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
It is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot thr...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The more pleasure a universe can yield, other things being equal, the more beneficent and generous i...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Consciousness is a born hermit.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
My atheism, like that of GEORGE SANTAYANA Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it mus...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
In Greece wise men speak and fools decide.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The superiority of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety of the pleasures...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
To understand one's self is the classic form of consolation; to delude one's self is the romantic.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Man is as full of potentiality as he is of impotence.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Nothing you can lose by dying is half as precious as the readiness to die, which is man's charter of...
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Old places and old persons in their turn, when spirit dwells in them, have an intrinsic vitality of ...
GEORGE SANTAYANA