George Santayana Quotes on Society
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American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.
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Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
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It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation.
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What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude: the aims of friendship, religion, science, and art.
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England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies, and humors.
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The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.
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The living have never shown me how to live.
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Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are.