Quote

Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of inertia it is by no means a representative of reason.

George Santayana

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George Santayana
Age: 88 †
Born: 1863
Born: October 2
Died: 1952
Died: September 16
Essayist
Novelist
Philosopher
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Madrid
Spain
Jorge Santayana
Jorge Augustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana
Jorge Augustin Nicolas Ruiz de Santayana
George Santayana
Reason
Equilibrium
Mean
Custom
Representatives
Customs
Natural
Means
Political
Inertia
Government
Representative

More quotes by George Santayana

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Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
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I like to walk about among the beautiful things that adorn the world but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty.
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To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.
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Heaven is to be at peace with things.
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Man's most serious activity is play.
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We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.
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I have imagination, and nothing that is real is alien to me.
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America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.
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The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.
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The muffled syllables that Nature speaks Fill us with deeper longing for her word She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks, She makes a sweeter music than is heard.
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Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists.
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Religion is indeed a convention which a man must be bred in to endure with any patience and yet religion, for all its poetic motley, comes closer than work-a-day opinion to the heart of things.
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In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity.
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To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language.
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... so in love the heart surrenders itself entirely to the one being that has known how to touch it. That being is not selected it is recognised and obeyed.
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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 only criminals sentenced by the law, but the other kills honest men who like himself bathe in innocent blood at the bidding of some superior.
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The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.
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A country without a memory is a country of madmen.
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Uselessness is a fatal accusation to bring against any act which is done for its presumed utility, but those which are done for their own sake are their own justification.
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To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
George Santayana