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

George Santayana Literature See all quotes by George Santayana →

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“Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge.”

“American life is a powerful solvent. As it stamps the immigrant, almost before he can speak English, with an unmistakable muscular tension, cheery self-confidence and habitual challenge in the voice and eyes, so it seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good-will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.”

“The soul, too, has her virginity and must bleed a little before bearing fruit.”

“It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation.”

“Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.”

“Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.”

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— Lucy Aharish

Journalism1981

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"Women’s studies has long constructed black feminism as a form of discipline inflicted on the field and has imagined black feminists as a set of disciplinarians who quite literally whip the field into …"

— Jennifer Christine Nash

Science1980

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"This new generation, for example, is not content with preachings against that vile form of collective murder — lynch law-which has broken out in our midst anew. We know that it is murder, and a delibe…"

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

Politics1882–1945

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"The human imagination has seldom had before it an object so sublimely ordered as the medieval cosmos. If it has an aesthetic fault, it is perhaps, for us who have known romanticism, a shade too ordere…"

— C. S. Lewis

Literature1925–1954

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