Meaning
A warning that people or societies that forget or refuse to learn from past events will be forced to live through the same mistakes again. It is usually quoted to argue for the study of history, commemoration or institutional memory. In practice it functions as a famous quotation rather than a freely varied proverb. Neutral-to-formal register; usually quoted verbatim and credited to Santayana, though often misattributed. Regional use: General English.
Origin
Written by the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana in The Life of Reason, volume 1, Reason in Common Sense (1905), chapter 12, pages 284-85, closing a passage arguing that progress depends on retaining past experience. Quote Investigator verifies the exact wording and traces popular variants such as 'those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it' to twentieth-century newspapers and columnists. Attributions to Edmund Burke and Winston Churchill are unsupported: no closely matching text has been found in Burke's writings, and the Churchill attribution appears only from 1985. Santayana's own context was a philosophical argument about mental development, not the inspirational maxim about formal historical study it is often taken to be.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it
- Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it
- Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it
- Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it
Usage Examples
- The museum director closed her speech with Santayana's warning that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
- Every post-mortem ends the same way: those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, and this team has a short memory.
- When the board proposed scrapping the incident archive, Priya reminded them that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.