8 George Santayana Quotes on Society

George Santayana quotes on society

3. 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.

15. 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.

19. It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation.

21. 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.

31. England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies, and humors.

32. 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.

37. The living have never shown me how to live.

38. Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are.