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.

Santayana wrote this line in the early twentieth century while developing a naturalistic philosophy of culture and history. It appears in the first volume of his major work The Life of Reason (1905), in a discussion of how reason and civilization arise from accumulated experience rather than from mere novelty. The passage reflects his broader skepticism toward the idea that “progress” is simply constant change; instead, he argues that improvement requires memory, continuity, and institutions capable of preserving lessons learned. The final sentence became widely quoted in political and educational contexts as a warning about historical amnesia.

Santayana distinguishes meaningful progress from change for its own sake. For him, improvement presupposes a stable subject—individual or society—able to retain experience, compare present with past, and choose a direction. If everything is in flux, there is no enduring agent to become better and no standard by which “better” can be measured. The famous closing maxim generalizes the point: forgetting history makes people vulnerable to reenacting the same errors, because the causal patterns and human motives that produced earlier outcomes remain. Memory, tradition, and historical study thus function as tools of practical reason, not mere antiquarian interests.

1) “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (often quoted alone)
2) “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”