"Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better."

Santayana, George on Advertising
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"There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colors of life in all their purity."

Santayana, George on Death and Dying
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"Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself."

Santayana, George on Dignity
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"Our dignity is not in what we do, but what we understand."

Santayana, George on Dignity
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"The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him."

Santayana, George on Disease
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"The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas."

Santayana, George on Education
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"The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool."

Santayana, George on Emotions
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"Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end."

Santayana, George on Emotions
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"The highest form of vanity is love of fame."

Santayana, George on Fame
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"The family is an early expedient and in many ways irrational. If the race had developed a special sexless class to be nurses, pedagogues, and slaves, like the workers among ants and bees, then the family would have been unnecessary. Such a division of labor would doubtless have involved evils of its own, but it would have obviated some drags and vexations proper to the family."

Santayana, George on Family
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"The family is one of nature's masterpieces."

Santayana, George on Family
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"Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim."

Santayana, George on Fanatics and Fanaticism
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"Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit."

Santayana, George on Fashion
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"That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject."

Santayana, George on Fear
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"The human mind is not rich enough to drive many horses abreast and wants one general scheme, under which it strives to bring everything."

Santayana, George on Focus
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"There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves."

Santayana, George on Food and Eating
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"A man is morally free when, in full possession of his living humanity, he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity."

Santayana, George on Freedom
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"Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots."

Santayana, George on Friends and Friendship
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"Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better."

Santayana, George on Fun
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"To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight to the blood."

Santayana, George on Aggression
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"It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands."

Santayana, George on America
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"America is a young country with an old mentality."

Santayana, George on America
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"Habit is stronger than reason."

Santayana, George on Habit
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"Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness."

Santayana, George on Happiness
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"Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experience."

Santayana, George on Happiness
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"History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten."

Santayana, George on History and Historians
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"The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer."

Santayana, George on Impossibility
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"Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own infinitude, and his infinitude is, in one sense, overcome."

Santayana, George on Inferiority
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"The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others."

Santayana, George on Institutions
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"Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it."

Santayana, George on Intolerance
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"Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace."

Santayana, George on Knowledge
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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."

Santayana, George on Liberty
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"Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament."

Santayana, George on Life and Living
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"The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature; so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to condor and humor. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world."

Santayana, George on Life and Living
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"Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with any honor is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all."

Santayana, George on Life, Lust For
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"The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise."

Santayana, George on Love
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"In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation, the truth of immortality. The most ideal human passion is love, which is also the most absolute and animal and one of the most ephemeral."

Santayana, George on Memory
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"When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different."

Santayana, George on Men and Women
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"Music is essentially useless, as life is."

Santayana, George on Music
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"Nonsense is good only because common sense is so limited."

Santayana, George on Nonsense
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