Fun Santayana quotes:
The last line of this one is famous, but it is often misappropriated by those who believe in infinite Progress, which it is actually a condemnation of,
"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."
"To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love."
One for PD, "Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude is, in one sense, overcome."
And here're a nice pair,
"Experience has repeatedly confirmed that well-known maxim of Bacon's that "a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion." At the same time, when Bacon penned that sage epigram... he forgot to add that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them."
"My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests."
"History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory. It might almost be said to be no science at all, if memory and faith in memory were not what science necessarily rest on. In order to sift evidence we must rely on some witness, and we must trust experience before we proceed to expand it. The line between what is known scientifically and what has to be assumed in order to support knowledge is impossible to draw. Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe."
"When Socrates and his two great disciples composed a system of rational ethics they were hardly proposing practical legislation for mankind...They were merely writing an eloquent epitaph for their country."
It may seem odd that someone who says all this would be admired by certain circles of rightists, Russel Kirk defined him as one of the great conservative thinkers of his time, 'course paleoconservatives represent a different kind of conservatism than most of us are used to. Not fond of these newfangled corporations and that laissez faire shit that destroyed the guilds and the socially conscious landed aristocracy of the middle ages (if the rich were so because of inherited real property that they and their descendents must live on, and had they the old governmental/social duties towards the people who lived in the region, they might not be environment raping kleptocrats who treat their workers as tools to raise profits rather than dignified human beings). Economically many have
distributist sentiments. You Europeans may be familiar with this economic philosophy through your Christian Democrat parties, but there is no conception of it in this nation. I myself only learned of it this year when looking up more info about a Papal encyclical I chanced across while perusing the dusty obsolete reference section of the library, the Rerum Novarum, which deeply impressed me
'course you might not like their fond remembrance of Monarchy, Aristocracy, and the American and British polities of the 18th century (democracy was a bad word until Jefferson's presidency), historically democracy was seen as synonymous with, or a form of, anarchy. So these folks are unhappy with universal suffrage being attained so haphazardly as to destabilize social/economic/political/legal traditions, though they're opposed to the change per se, they're all about gradualism, and trying to make reforms that respect traditional institution and practices. It's old, so it works. The idealism of the radical social reformer and his Rights of Man, and the mathematical models society as flows of currency and resource, of human lives as units of labor whose only wellbeing is to buy more at lower cost, the world perceived by the new aristocracy of manufacturers and financiers, and its more extreme form, the Socialist planned economy, can hopelessly conflict with practicality and human and make things worse. E.G. the French Revolution descending into the Reign of Terror, or compare the fortune of South Africa, with its slow and steady improvement, with that of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), which tried to redress the evils of colonialism in one fell swoop.
haven't receive any letters regarding their seizure either...
